


Cheer Up

by CourierNew



Category: LISA (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-05-05
Packaged: 2018-09-25 17:58:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 35,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9836549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CourierNew/pseuds/CourierNew
Summary: "None of this is funny. That's why you should laugh."Olathe is done. After Buddy Armstrong's rampage brought it to its knees, the last few scraps of civilization rotted and died. But Buddy herself is still around, with trumpet and child in tow. Her journey across the ruined land carries her to the very edge of the world and the secrets that lay there, where she will learn if there is anything about Olathe, or herself, that's still worth saving.





	1. The Drink

**Author's Note:**

> Cheer up, baby, it wasn't always quite so bad.  
> \- Modest Mouse, "Spitting Venom"
> 
> Minute by minute we move toward the restoration.  
> \- Joshua Beckman, "Let the People Die"

The sky was sick.

The Great White Flash had done more than carry off the women of Olathe; it had filled the land with all manner of strangeness. The earth heaved up like an affliction of boils, these broken plateaus leading to alien geographies without reason or warning. And for each territory, its own weather, frozen still. Skies ranging from lemonade-yellow to sundowner orange to putrescent green, or locked forever in dusk and studded with unfamiliar constellations. If someone climbed to a certain altitude then maybe they could see those skies all at once, like a mad patchwork quilt, and some of those skies even had their own suns, as though the sun that Olathe had once known had been blown to pieces by the Flash and scattered to the wind. But no one ever bothered to look. The post-Flash population of Olathe was not, generally speaking, interested in astronomy. Most of them couldn’t mend a sock without stabbing themselves in the eye.

But one thing they all noticed was the lack of rain. The clouds hung overhead as if painted and they offered no relief. The only water came from rusted pumps erupting from the ground like sad monuments and was so full of silt and sludge that anyone daring a drink would probably have to chew it. Olathians instead subsisted on canned coffee, soda, and draincleaner-quality alcohol, but none of that was any help to the land itself, which became so dry and cracked that it looked like the world itself had come down with a particularly virulent case of eczema.

Here now was a dust-choked village huddled at the edge of a great dry hole – a lake, or possibly a crater, because there had never been any lakes in Olathe, but there had also never been swamps or mountains or fields of endless bare girders and the Great White Flash had left all three in its after-image. The lakebed was fissured and caught in the jaw of perpetual dusk. The sun lay half-exposed on the horizon like a discolored eggyolk, and its sweltering light pooling in the cracked dirt to make the lakebed look fleshy, filled with pulsating capillaries. Silent, save for the wind.

And then, a thin trickle.

Liquid spilled down the side of the lakebed, off-yellow and smelling of old laundry and formaldehyde. Its point of origin, between the legs of a man perched at the edge of the hole, bare toes flexing at its lip. Pants around his ankles, stained gray shawl smeared with dust. Pale. Flabby. He looked like a melted candle that had rolled around a barbershop floor.

Roddy Derringer kept pissing into the hole for almost a full minute. When the stream finally began to abate, he grunted, fired it up again, waited for it to subside, waved the last few droplets around, and gave one final celebratory hip-thrust into the sunset. He hitched up his pants and ambled back to the town.

The barroom door squealed on its hinges and dislodged yet more dust as he stepped inside. No customers. There hadn’t been any in almost a year now.

This little settlement had always been a festering shitheap just like anywhere else in Olathe, but now all the doors hung half-open, the planks and tarps caving in. The “BAR” sign over Roddy’s own door had been sanded down to just the right half of the letter “B.” Roddy, in one of his more contemplative moments, mused that if he turned his head the right way it looked like a decent pair of tits.

His supplies were chaotically scattered on the shelves behind the bar. He took a bite out of a hanging hunk of jerky, gagged on the taste, grabbed a bottle at random to wash it down, gagged harder, and managed to swallow. He pulled up his chair and sat down, back facing the door, scratching his balls with one hand and slapping around under the bar with the other. His palm came to rest on something sticky.

No more customers. No more warlords. No more drifters or wrestlers or weird half-naked cosplayers. The sea of dipshits had run dry. The Big Girl had seen to that.

Roddy was the type to get winded if he sat up too fast after taking a dump, so he hadn’t joined in the hunt that had cleared out almost half of Olathe’s population and given the Big Girl motivation to go after the other half. He’d practically hidden under his bar with revolver in hand, jowls quivering at every creak. And when he’d emerged again, the town had gone empty. He’d scavenged everything he could from the homes. Enough supplies to last him for years, even though he’d left one or two shacks untouched – because when he’d opened the doors he’d seen _them,_ those soft heaps of moaning flesh draped over the scant furniture like grotesque blankets.

There was a gentle purring noise as Roddy peeled a magazine off the stack beneath the bar. With effort and care, he pried the pages apart. All of these mags had been so lovingly used that the pictures inside resembled nothing more than masses of churned meat, but he was nothing if not dedicated.

He was a man with ample food and drink at the end of the world. That left time for only one real activity – taking little Roddy out on the racetrack.

He spat on his palm and got to work.

He was on his third lap and going strong when the door behind him creaked. He didn’t notice, didn’t hear. He was grunting, heaving, the splintery chair threatening to give way at any moment. Sweat gleamed pearlescent on his pate as he finished, thrusting his hips forward with a moan. The whole bar smelled faintly of codfish.

Roddy caught his breath, wiped his hand on his shawl (it was so crusted that it would hold its shape in a hurricane), and tossed the magazine to the side; it hit the planks with an audible squelch. He turned around to grab another, and then froze.

He had a customer.

This was the story: once upon a time, there had been a world with no women. The men left behind fell into every manner of debauchery to distract from that throbbing unsatisfied need, like fire ants crawling on the crotch. Then, a rumor. One last girl, hiding in some nobody’s basement. The men had pursued her everywhere. Greasy bloodstained fingers desperate for soft skin. They’d pushed her to the brink, and then pushed her a little further, and then, she’d made a decision – if the whole world wanted to fuck her, then she’d just fuck all of them right back. The last girl, this little girl, now the Big Girl, stopped running and turned to face them with something animal in her eye. She’d hacked everyone on the List to bits, even the legendary Big Lincoln, even Rando himself, and then she’d disappeared, without even leaving a blood trail in her wake.

Roddy remembered the posters. The woman sitting in his bar now barely resembled them. She was taller, gangling, and wore a tattered brown poncho that hung on her like a sail. Her hair was an unkempt mass, stiff and spikey as a sea urchin. But her bare arms looked mostly unmarked, the flesh creamy and smooth, and even through that oversized poncho, he could see the soft new bumps on her chest.

The Big Girl was back. And Roddy’s little rod was already standing at attention.

“Take your time,” she said. Voice husky and thin. “Don’t mind us.”

He didn’t even notice it at first, but there was another. She had a child in the crook of her arm, a pudgy blackhaired infant wearing rough-sewn shorts and nothing else. It stared, and blinked, and made no sound.

Roddy swallowed hard. After a moment’s contemplation, he remembered to pull his pants back up.

“What, uh.” He grunted and tugged the waistband over his gut. “What can I get you?”

“Whiskey. And clean water. If you have any.”

“Nobody does. Might have a Cocola-Cola around here, somewhere…”

“No. It’s fine.”

He grabbed a cloudy brown bottle off the shelves, set it on the bar, then dove back underneath for glasses. And while he was down there, he grabbed his weathered old revolver and shoved it in the back of his pants.

He walked to the lone table, careful not to show his back, set down the glasses, set down the bottle, and sat in the chair opposite her. He attempted a smile. She did not smile back. The gunbarrel chafed on the crack of his ass.

“Sorry about all that,” he said. “Not a pretty sight, I know. My varsity days are behind me.” He’d never played sports.

She didn’t touch the bottle or the glasses. Both she and the child were unnervingly still. Behind that thatch of hair he could see her one eye gleaming like a fleck of mica. After another moment, he filled both glasses himself and slid one over to her. The liquid had the sheen and aroma of kerosene.

“On the house,” he said. “Not like there’s anything much to spend money on these days, anyway.”

“Thank you,” she said. The words were slightly strained, like she had to force them out.

“Don’t mention it. Cute kid.” He glanced at the mute child. “What’s its name?”

“Doesn’t have one.”

“Oh. Uh…who’s the dad?”

“Some asshole.”

“Oh.”

Her hair covered her scars. Her lips were chapped and red. Smelling like dust and cured meat. This woman had killed more people than he would ever see.

“Look,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “I’m not going to try anything. You probably didn’t expect to see anyone here, right?”

“I wasn’t expecting anything.”

“Well, that works out then. I don’t know about you, but I’ve missed having some company. You can keep the bottle. Let’s just have a drink,” he raised his glass, “and go our separate ways.”

For a time, there was only the sighing of the wind. Then, she turned slightly to her glass, and raised it to her mouth.

Roddy whipped out his revolver and leveled it at the child’s head.

Her hand froze with the glass to her lips. Roddy set his own drink aside and thumbed back the gun’s hammer. The click was very loud. His whole face twitched and shivered as if trying to run away from the bone. Somewhere in his atrophied brain his survival instinct was desperately trying to make itself heard over his little rod’s shriek for release.

“Here’s how it’s gonna go,” he said. “You just set that little guy aside, real slow, and come sit down on my lap for a bit. I’ll make sure to keep my hand real steady, no matter what happens. You try anything and your kid’s brains paint the planks, understand?”

She set the glass down, carefully. The scarlet light that leaked through the cracks in the barroom walls lay across her face in stripes like someone caged. The beetle-shell shine of her one eye looked weary.

She said, “How does it end?”

“What?”

“If I do want you want,” she said. “What happens next?”

“You...take the kid and leave?”

“No.”

He jerked the gun. “Then I shoot it right now.”

“Okay,” she said. “What happens next?”

Certain logistical issues with his plan were rapidly making themselves known.

“I knew what you would do the minute I saw you,” she said. “What I don’t know is why. Do you take Joy?”

“No,” he whispered. His gun hand was now shaking very badly. “Saw what happened to the ones who did. Always scared the bejesus out of me.”

“Good. Put down the gun.”

“I.” He licked his lips. “Please?”

She didn’t answer.

“For all I know I’m the last man on earth. I got no one else. You killed everyone else! What else was I gonna do when you just walked in and sat down? Just give me five minutes.” No answer. “Two minutes?” No answer. “Can I cop a feel, at least?”

When she still remained mute something in his vision flashed red.

“God dammit,” he cried, and swung the gun over to her, “what’re you even good for, you-”

Her free arm came up and clamped around his wrist and before his eyes even reported the movement there was a wet _snap_ and his fingers all turned to jelly, gun clattering to the table as she released her grip and set Roddy staggering backwards, howling at his bent and reddened arm. He tripped over his own feet and cracked his head on the far wall of the bar and she still sat there, her and the child staring, staring.

“It’s a clean break,” she said. “Keep it wrapped and it should heal in a month or two. You can jack off with the other hand, for a while.” She screwed the bottlecap back on and stood up, taking the whiskey with her. “Thank for the drink.”

As she walked out the door Roddy saw a trumpet at her hip. It swayed as if waving goodbye.

He sat there for a second, his wrist full of stabbing pains in time with his pulse, blinking tears out of his eyes. Then he grit his teeth and clambered back to his feet and out of the bar, grabbing the revolver off the table as he went.

“Get back here, you _bitch!”_

Then he stepped outside and stopped dead.

The town mobbed with strangers. These geometries of warped flesh and elongated bone. Joy Mutants by the dozen, by the score, all vacant eyes and wide smiles if their new skulls could support them, rivulets of drool running down their cheeks. Men with bodies broken like tents or collapsed into pillars or bent double on spines telescoped to twice their length so their backs broke backward and left their scalps trailing on the dirt. And amongst these mounds of carnivorous skin was the girl, the trumpet now in her free hand. The sunset buried Roddy in all their shadows.

His bladder gave way again. Urine ran out his pantleg as he raised his arm in surrender.

“Please,” he said. “Please.”

“I know,” she answered. “You can’t help yourself.”

And he felt a moment of relief before she raised the trumpet to her lips and played two short, sharp notes, and then every Joy Mutant’s smiling face swiveled as one towards him. He realized what was about to happen and raised the gun to his own temple but just before he could pull the trigger a mutant shot forward and clamped its grinning teeth around the arm and pulled it out of his socket like wet clay.

Buddy had already turned away, started walking to the dry lake. The screams echoed after her.

When she reached the edge of the lake bed she sat down, legs dangling over the lip. She tied the trumpet back to her waist and set the child on her lap. He, too, was drooling, large liquid eyes watching nothing. She opened the bottle and poured some of the alcohol on her finger, then pinched the child’s jaw with her other hand. His mouth obediently opened.

As Roddy’s death-wails subsided into gurgles and the sound of chewing, Buddy ran her finger along the child’s gums, rubbing in the whiskey. She felt the first hard nubs of teeth pushing through. Brad had done this for her once, or so she’d heard. They’d said she’d cried constantly at that time. The child did not cry. He rarely made any sound at all.

Behind her, a soft scraping noise. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Brad’s scarred and stony face. She wasn’t surprised. He didn’t listen as well as the others did. Around his corpulent mass was tied a few saddlebags containing jerky and drink. If he was going to stick around then she figured he had might as well be of use.

The sunlight lay warm on her skin as she shrugged off the poncho, the hidden pouch inside quietly rattling with its wicked pills. The bartender had said that he didn’t use Joy but she would go back inside after and look around anyway. For now, someone else needed a drink. She pressed the child’s head to her undamaged breast and felt his gums clamp over the nipple. This was something else her uncles had told her she would have to do. She didn’t know how long she could do it for. She, too, felt like she was running dry.

Still, there was enough to satisfy the child, and after a minute or two he let go and leaned back. She wiped a droplet of milk from the corner of its mouth.

He said, “Muh.”

She stared.

“Muh,” said the child. “Ma. Ma muh.”

Buddy opened her mouth as if in reply and instead turned the child around so he faced the sunset. The two of them watching the paralyzed sky and the arid land below. The mutants had finished their meal and fallen vacant. The dirt drank the spilled blood and quickly dried up again. Buddy felt the child’s heartbeat in her hands. Don’t call me that, she wanted to say. I never asked you to call me that.


	2. The Orphans

She didn’t love the child but she thought that was all right. Love had not made a good impression on her. It had been the mushroom-smelling dark of Brad’s cellar as he thrashed and moaned upstairs, or the clutching, desperate hands of nearly everyone she’d met. The last she’d heard of love had been from Buzzo as his body melted and reformed, crooning an unfamiliar name through mouthfuls of his own malformed tissue. She didn’t understand it. She had no one left to ask.

Nor was it love that drove her to gather the mutants – to find them in their shacks and caverns and, with a few toots from that battered trumpet, rouse them from their stupor and drag themselves along on whatever warped limbs they still had. She had no name for what guided her songs. The mutants seemed to listen to the feelings behind the notes rather than the notes themselves; they jerked along as if on puppet strings, smiling all the while. At first, she thought that she was gathering the mutants for the sake of anyone still alive in Olathe, because with the warlords dead they were by far the biggest threat, lying amorphous in the shadows and damp places of the world like fleshy beartraps, so she uprooted them and carried them with her like a pocketful of flowers. But there didn’t seem to be anyone left alive. The blasted landscape rolled out before her wherever she walked and sometimes the wind snagged on some mountain and seemed to chuckle, as if to say, congratulations on your victory, now behold your inheritance – a rolling expanse of absolute fuck-all.

But she continued to herd the mutants anyway, these stray and orphaned freaks. As the child grew heavier under her arm so too did the mutants’ numbers grow, their strange silhouettes melding and morphing in the sun. Brad always at the front of their number, his face still unsmiling and heavy-browed on the scarred and misshapen slug his body had become. Isolated, even now. Even the trumpet didn’t seem to fully affect him; he was always slow to stop moving and a moment too quick to start when she commanded it. He seemed docile enough but she kept the child away from him. Visions of those jaws clamping on the child’s soft skull and twisting it off his shoulders like a bottlecap.

Occasionally she thought that if she truly valued the child’s safety then she would just kill the lot of them, Brad included. But she had cast her blade aside, planted it in a mound of upturned earth near some anonymous plateau, a red skull mask dangling from its hilt. In the space of about a week she’d gone through half of Olathe like a threshing machine and when she’d jammed Dr. Yado’s vaccine into her arm and pushed the plunger down she’d seen that coiling blue-red haze banished from the corners of her vision and smelled blood so thick and coppery that it had seemed almost invasive, coating her tongue and throat like moss. She’d vomited and crawled off with a splitting headache, and awoken to find herself feeling hollow and clear as a discarded empty. No more killing. The joy had gone out of it.

Violence now was a necessary chore. The bartender, for one, but mostly she reserved it for the saddest of mutants, the ones too warped or too hopelessly entangled in their surroundings to wrench themselves into the sunlight and follow her. Mutants with their spines gone spiral so all they could do was flop pitifully in place, or weaving around rock formations such that she could barely tell where their flesh began or ended. If she came across such creatures, she would make sure the herd was well out of earshot, and then hold up the trumpet and play a slightly different song. And when the mutants heard it, they would raise their heads, flare their nostrils, and gleefully begin eating themselves. Just as Buzzo had in his final extremity. They would continue to chew until they bled out or broke themselves into splinters searching for new skin to bite.

These were her days, now – the long silence, the gnawing thirst, the child’s mouth at her breast, the rolling grotesquerie of bodies carving their trails into the dry dirt. All of it done with cold, senseless obligation that coated her thoughts and muffled them like cotton wool. But sometimes she would wait a while after playing her lethal song, and watch the mutants shudder and spasm, blood running freely from their bitemarks and gobbets of masticated flesh falling from their grins, and she would think, Maybe this is love.

*             *             *

She was strong. She liked to believe she’d always been strong, in certain ways, but after carving up the List and taking the vaccine it was downright undeniable – the Joy she’d binged on had given her monstrous vitality, and it was like the vaccine had chased the drug out of her system but left that strength behind. She didn’t tire or stiffen no matter how far she walked holding the child. As Roddy Derringer learned the hard way, her physical prowess was unnatural for someone her size. And she healed quickly; once she’d experimentally slit her palm open with a piece of flint, and before the day was done the wound had clotted, scabbed, and scarred.

The child had almost killed her anyway.

She’d still been inexperienced when her belly began to swell. Skulking around what was left of Olathe, practicing her clumsy musicianship on Brad or the scant few mutants she stumbled across. Still shellshocked from the Joy crash and the unhindered sight of the desolation she’d trailed in her wake. The first thing she had done was return to Dusty’s body and feebly try to bury it, tearing her nails and blunting her sword in her attempts to pierce the ground, eventually reduced to pounding the earth, pounding his chest, cursing him for not getting back up. His flayed face made no more peaceful in death, staring up at her with that carved and permanent grin and the second grin she’d sliced in his throat. All these things lost and never to be recovered.

It was that face that hung in her mind as the child took form inside her. That shy, stuttering voice always insisting that she would have to bear up the world’s future. As her body distended and the child started to kick she’d salvaged saddlebags and hoarded as much food and drink as she could in preparation of what was to come, then crawled into a cave with an entrance too small for any mutant to enter. Brad and the others on silent watch outside as she lay out her supplies and lit scrapwood fires and waited for the pain.

If anyone had happened at that particular time to approach that cave then they would have been treated to an unnerving sight. A motley handful of mutants huddled around the low and blackened entrance, and from out of that hole shrieks and curses to make the clouds shudder. Buddy was no stranger to pain, she’d been mutilated even before throwing herself at Olathe’s warlords, but she still went through labor screaming up at the ceiling until bloodflecked spittle patterned her cheeks, smashing her fists into the ground until the stone nearly cratered. Thinking back, she decided that her cries had not been borne from the agony so much as the indignity. The knowledge that, even after all she’d done, she had still been laid low and made so vulnerable. It was the future even Dusty had wanted her to bear and the future she had struggled and failed to avoid and so she beat and cursed and swore at Brad and Dusty and Olathe until that harridan’s chorus ricocheted off the cavern walls and returned as a condemnation upon Buddy herself, and then there had been one last freshet of blood, a feeling of being torn down the middle, and she had screamed until her jaw was fit to crack at the sight of the reddened parasitic thing between her legs still tethered to her by its slimy umbilicus. With sweating hands she had fumbled in the dark for her saber and hacked at the stones until the cord was cut, and just as she caught her breath, the child had opened its mouth and begun to wail.

She had thought of killing it right there. But the umbilical cord was the last thing her blade would ever cut. She’d cast the weapon aside and cleaned the child as best she could with handfuls of used gauze, and then put the blind and shuddering face to her breast until its mouth clasped over her.

That night she came down with a fever. The exertions of birth opening the way for whatever germs she’d sustained in Olathe’s filth to run wild. She’d struggled to breathe, unsure of whether she was awake or asleep as the child continued to cry, swaddled in a stained and bundled poncho. The cave had dripped and run like wax around her, her bloodshot eyes seeing the world covered in an oily rainbow haze. She had thought for certain she would die there.

In her sickness she had dreamt a man. He’d entered the cave like a shadow and was featureless as a shadow himself, a silhouette far too tall, long-limbed and with a head bulging at the top like a mushroom. When he spoke she’d heard his voice in a guttural harmonic that dragged itself behind the words like some great scaled carapace.

“You must be well,” said the man. _Yooouuuu muuuust beeee welllll._

It had not been a supposition but a command. And as Buddy lay there paralyzed with fever the swaying bulbous man had bent low and pressed a fingertip against her soaked forehead.

“Be well.” _Beeee wellll._

Then he had turned and wavered and vanished. And later that night, her fever broke.

She never learned if the man had been real. There were no footprints leading out of the cave and the mutants had been undisturbed, but then, the ground was baked too hard for prints and she’d left the mutants docile anyway. She had dragged herself to her provisions and eaten and drank and then fed the child, who had also fallen silent overnight. She wondered if the spectre of the man had frightened him into silence. But when she emerged from the cave several days later, hand held up to shade the child’s eyes, he still made no sound. To this day he rarely made any sound at all. As if those new eyes had looked upon the world she had made, and found it unworthy of remark.

*             *             *

She scavenged the village where Roddy had died and found little. A few hunks of jerky, some abandoned rations, yet more liquor that she didn’t particularly want to drink. She extracted the few resident mutants from their homes and found Joy in most of them. Those little capsules and their unnatural cobalt glow.

She had sewn a pocket in the inner folds of her poncho and in this pocket was a small drawstring pouch. The pouch now bulged with pills. Probably more Joy than had ever existed in one place and she added to its number by the week. She could say from ample experience that the drug was the greatest remaining threat to Olathe besides the mutants, and like the mutants she hoarded it and kept it close. She couldn’t think of any safer place for it. She thought of throwing it off a cliffside or into a bog somewhere but then remembered an overheard conversation between her uncles, where they’d darkly muttered about how Brad had tossed his own stash away only to go crawling down the rocks for it again and again. 

Joy was poison no matter where it went. Throw it in the mashes and it would further poison the water. Crush it and toss it to the wind and it would poison the air. The drugs held no temptation for her now but the growing number of mutants was proof enough that they were still an easy way out for many. And once someone took the pills, there didn’t seem to be any way to pull them out of addiction again. Brad had mutated even after collapsing and bleeding out in front of her. This wicked medicine pulling him back from death, altogether changed. And so she instead kept it close to her heart. 

She picked the town clean and surveyed what remained. The sun nailed to the horizon, Roddy’s carcass already drying in the heat. She lifted the tarnished horn to her lips and blasted out a summons that made all the mutants straighten what remained of their spines. She led them out. They carried on.

*             *             *

From place to place she went, in search of something living.

The marshlands were one of the more vibrant regions still in Olathe – the frozen sky here was covered by a thick and soupy fog, and the stifling humidity filled the bogs with all manner of greenery. She had to keep the mutants out of here, otherwise the mud would likely swallow them whole.

The land still offered her little. She’d tried to gather up the marshwater and render it drinkable but it remained brackish no matter how long she boiled it. And it seemed to have gone bad anyway, because lately she saw fishbones bobbing to the surface. Many of the skeletons were badly deformed. Mysteriously, one was wearing a neat little bowler hat.

She traveled to the manor at the edge of the marsh as she had done several times before. She didn’t know what the purpose of this place had been but it was among the more intact and palatial buildings in Olathe, relatively clean and undamaged (most wooden structures had long since been ravaged for scrap to burn). For some reason there seemed to be an awful lot of fishnet stockings and high heels scattered about, and the walls still held a ghostly aroma of floral perfume and nicotine.

No one else was there. In the office at the top of the building she found the usual sight. A man in woman’s dress, with a great blond frightwig of hair, sprawled back in his chair with a revolver in his stiffened hand and a red hole in his scalp. The moisture and mold had found the man greatly fascinating. His cheeks were rouged with fungus, his once-manicured nails recolored verdigris by new growth. Strings of plant matter dangled and festered in his hair. His eyes were wide, staring at nothing.

On her way back she heard a sound. Some unknown vibration scratching at her ear, at the soles of her feet. She poked around the small settlement on the bog’s opposite edge and found a small cave leading down. As she entered the sound coalesced into something that, if she listened for a while and tried to keep an open mind, she could reluctantly call a song. A single untuned string plucked again and again in a lurching tempo, and underneath, a vocalization, not even singing so much as a modulated moan.

Cautiously she made her way down, the child placid as ever in her grip. As her eye adjusted to the dark she saw a brighter line of color in the ceiling overhead and discovered that it was flesh, a thick rope of desiccated tissue that ran the length of the corridors like a macabre party streamer. She followed that flesh as the cave turned in on itself, leading ever further down. The song itched like insects in her ears.

When she turned a corner the song abruptly stopped and she saw shining metal in the dark. As she approached she found that the shine came from a rusted diver’s helmet, its wearer a tall man sitting crosslegged on the ground. The flesh, too, terminated here, in a fanged and dangling mutant’s head almost eaten away to the bone by rot.

The man held his instrument, a single-stringed guitar, in limp arms. The helmet’s porthole was fixed on the mutant. Buddy stepped closer and saw that the string was so rusted and frayed that it could probably be broken by the touch of a passing mosquito. When the man made no indication he’d heard her approach she gingerly reached out and touched the helmet and the man tilted over and struck the ground. The head inside the helmet rattled like a handful of dice. The man had been dead for a long time.

*             *             *

There seemed to be no end to the caves. The land rendered porous by the Great White Flash. Buddy could have sworn they were multiplying as she wandered, but in every one she always found some dismal trace of habitation – a tent, a candle, some patch of obscene graffiti.

At the mouth of one such cave Buddy paused and tilted her head. The wall bore a drawing of a nude and reclining woman, her hair a great black cloud around a vaguely scrawled face – two half-lidded eyes, no other features. It was a better rendering than most she’d seen but the artist’s lack of familiarity with the subject material was still clear. The breasts stuck out from the woman’s chest like a pair of torpedoes and the cleft between her legs was little more than a thick black slash. She looked past the drawing and in the growing darkness further down the cave’s throat she made out similar scribblings. She glanced at the child. He showed no interest or recognition at the sight.

Buddy took a candle from her supplies and pushed deeper into the cave. Inside she found quite the menagerie. Drawings of naked women in all manner of poses, seated, spread-legged, on all fours like dogs. They were all buxom even if their anatomy was questionable and few of them were drawn with complete faces – this one with a nose and one eye, this one with just a pouting set of lips. As she pressed on the artist’s work developed. The women’s blank expressions became something recognizable as human, looking hunted or pleading or weary. One larger painting was leaned forward, curls of dark hair spilling around her face. The lips bulged and warped as if pressing forth from the stone.

In the candle’s guttering flame the artwork warped further. The charcoal became marred with whorls of red and the women started to change. Their breasts so swollen they were crushed under their weight, their arms bent backward, their mouths howling to expose broken and jagged teeth. Buddy felt the ground underfoot turn soft and looked down; the dark stone had turned oddly pale.

Here was a woman standing with both legs apart, both arms shoved into her abdomen up to the elbow, her mouth a vast rectangular trap. Here was a woman clawing herself in two, the ever-redder linework spewing forth from the wound in an abstract tangle. Here was a woman of nothing but eyes, long-lashed, red-pupiled, birthing yet more eyes that trailed away from her like the tail of a comet. And when Buddy finally stopped and cast the candle’s light around she saw that paleness all along the floor, and realized that the ground was pulsing underfoot, and the cave echoed with a labored breathing that was all too familiar. She clutched the child closer and advanced cautiously, no longer regarding the demented artwork.

The Joy Mutant, like these drawings, had no visible face; it was covered by a black mask upon which was sketched a wide and staring eye. Its skin had expanded until it puddled far in every direction; in the candle’s guttering glow Buddy made out small lumps here and there, bones floating free in the mass. A hand stuck out several feet from the head like that of someone drowning. Its fingers had been chewed to bare sinew.

Buddy left the cave quickly, she and the child blinking in the sun. She cast the candle aside and took up her trumpet. Down the cave mouth she played her summons. She wasn’t certain the mutant would be able to move or even if it would still have teeth to devour itself, but after a moment she heard a soft rustle in response and from the cave it emerged, its flesh scraping against the walls, its outer edge rippling and carrying it along like some strange flatworm.

*             *             *

She found somewhere new. This wasn’t uncommon. The pathways through Olathe were many and Buddy’s progress was unhurried. Most of the mutants took a while to get anywhere, Brad included – though he seemed to be moving faster over time, pushing himself closer to the front of the pack on each venture.

Here was a patch of desert locked into the edge of twilight, where the horizon was the color of a bruise and the stars poked through the sky overhead like questing insects. Buddy stood before a building, long and tall and slantroofed, its windows smashed and its plain white walls marred with graffiti. She had never seen a structure in this shape before and couldn’t discern its purpose until she cast her eye upward and saw the crucifix atop the roof, piercing the sky like an obscene gesture.

She knew little about religion. After the Flash, the name of God became just one more type of profanity, and Brad especially had been viciously opposed to any discussion of the topic. As with most things, she’d had to ask her uncles, and their answers had been vague and faintly embarrassed. She looked behind her at the mutants. The crowd had now expanded such that they likely would not fit in this church even if they all stood shoulder to broken shoulder. The taller ones swayed gently in place, necks and limbs bent like cacti in the cold wind. Brad edged forward. He didn’t appear to react to the church.

She blew her horn to still them and entered the church alone with a fresh candle in hand, stepping carefully through the rubble and broken glass. The interior was a shambles. Filled with the smell of dust and dried urine. Much of the furniture had been chopped apart and dragged out for scrapwood and empty bottles glimmered like jewels in the dark, a sure sign that someone had taken up residence here in the past. She found more scattered candles around the pulpit and lit them with the one in hand; the ancient wicks’ glow was feeble and dim, but enough to help her navigate the rubble.

Many of the windows had been smashed from the outside and Buddy was fascinated by the broken color scattered about. The brown bottles were overwhelmed by the shine of the scattered stained glass. The windows themselves still had their edges intact and in some of them she saw vivid symbols. A heart, a lamb, a light. For all of these things there was no accounting.

She searched beneath the pulpit and in the surrounding drawers and only found more candles. Anything of use had been stripped away long ago. She shut the last drawer with a hard _clunk_ and in the ensuing silence she stiffened at the new sound she heard. Breathing, that familiar labored rasp.

Buddy untied the trumpet and stalked around the church until she pinpointed the source of the noise. It emerged from behind a shut and scarred door beside the hall’s entrance. She tightened her hold on the child again but he seemed unconcerned; his head twisted this way and that, gaping wordlessly at the broken windows and the starlit night beyond.

She opened the door and stepped back quickly at the crazed moundwork of flesh she found there. A mass of pale and knotted tissue in the midst of which a scragglehaired head rotated and fixed upon her its lipless grin, its bulging rheumatic eyes. She sounded the trumpet and the mutant stiffened, and then sagged. She blew again and the mutant stepped out, unknotting itself one limb at a time. Arms and legs and torso elongated like warm taffy, the skin stretched thin as parchment except for a dangling potbelly and the sad little rope between its legs. When it stood to its full height its head nearly scraped the ceiling. She swung the trumpet to the entrance and played another command, and the mutant took a step forward and then fell over as one tripod leg broke with a sound clear and sharp as a rifle shot. It lurched its way to the exit on its remaining three limbs, tearing its nails on the ground, bloodying its knees in the glass. It was too large for the doorway and there was a great groaning and release of plaster as it forced its way through and destroyed the doorframe and much of the surrounding wall.

Buddy watched it go, then turned her attention to the room into which it had enfolded itself. In the weak light from the candles at the halls’ opposite side she saw that the chamber was small, barely larger than an outhouse, with a single seat upholstered in red velvet that had faded to medicinal pink and torn to shreds by its last resident. She fetched one of the candles and, after a moment, stepped inside.

The stink within was nauseating; the mutants dripped fluids constantly and the carpet here was squishing and swampy underfoot. She took a seat with the child on her lap and cast the candle around. The wall opposite her was mostly splintered and bare, save for a single shuttered wooden window. Her uncles had told her about these places. People who felt they’d done wrong would sit here and speak of their guilt to someone in the other room. When Buddy had asked them why people would do that her uncles had trailed off, muttering. Whatever explanation they could give was apparently unfit for the world that existed now.

She was about to leave when she saw the gougework below the window looked different than the scratchings of the mutant. She bent low, eye narrowed, and in the candlelight saw words written there – the letters rough and thick, carved deep by something sharp clutched in clumsy hands. It read:

_Please make room for us. – Nina_

She sat back again, expressionless. The child make a faint gurgle in the back of his throat. He needed to be fed again soon. Every time she had less to give him.

The candles around the pulpit were already starting to die. The one in her hand dripped hot wax and she felt nothing when it touched her skin. She wondered if whoever the mutant had been had first come in here to confess. What things had been said in this room. What this message’s author had said. What Buddy herself would say, were anyone there to listen.

*             *             *

She crossed an ashen plain with a sky the color of tin, where the wind blew cold and fierce enough to sandblast her skin with grit. Even the child, serene as he was, winced and whimpered at the gale chewing him raw, and she wrapped her poncho around him and looked for somewhere to take shelter. Even the mountains around here had gone scarce. Eventually she found one, on its lonesome, a spare stone spire jutting from the earth like a colossal fang. Its entrance was wide and inviting.

She commanded the mutants to remain where they were. They obediently stood in place, heedless to their own chafed and reddening flesh.

Only a few steps inside she realized something was wrong. She heard a dim crackle further down the tunnel, scented a whiff of kerosene. And as she continued inside, a faint glow presented itself, growing brighter, until she saw a burning oil drum that filled this cave with its stinking, greasy heat. In its light, sitting crosslegged, was a man.

He appeared not to notice her. He was thin and pallid, his hair hanging in scraggly tendrils sheened with grease. He was wearing an old grey hoodie much too small for him; the sleeves went halfway up to his elbows and the hem barely covered his bellybutton. His head was bowed, his hands clasped over something unseen. Finally he looked up, and at the sight of Buddy he cried out and scuttled back and then cried out again as the back of his head struck the barrel with a great hollow _clang._

Buddy stood there, nonplussed, as the man groaned and rubbed his head. On the ground before him was a deck of cards.

“Are you alone?” she asked.

“What?” He stopped rubbing and blinked. “I mean. Yes. I don’t think there’s anyone else here. Nasty weather outside, huh? Ha ha.”

His voice cracked on that slightly desperate laugh. Now that his face was in full sight Buddy noticed how young he was. The skin was chapped and dirty but mostly unlined and his mustache and beard were almost pitifully wispy.

“There was that guy,” he jabbed a thumb into the darkness, “but it should be okay. He hasn’t moved in a while.”

She looked where he was pointing and her eye widened at the sight of a Joy Mutant slumped against the wall. It hadn’t been a particularly large one but its shape was impossible to discern; it had been burned to a crisp, the flesh flaking and charcoaled.

“Did you do that?”

“Yes. Yep. That was me.”

“How?”

He smiled weakly and held out his hands. “Magic.”

She had nothing to say to that. The fire muttered and spat.

“Hey,” he said. “You’re the Big Girl, aren’t you?” A pause. “That was a really stupid question.”

“Yes.”

“You can rest here, if you want. I’m not going to. Um. Rape you. Or anything.”

“Really.”

“You hear that a lot?”

“Not for long.”

“I mean it, though,” he said, and picked up the deck of cards again. “I was actually born right before the world ended. I’ve never even seen a girl before. Don’t get me wrong, I still get, you know, urges, but it kind of helps that I never really knew what I was missing. Ha ha.” His mouth twitched. He added, “My name’s Jack.”

 After a moment, she said, “Buddy.”

“Yes?”

“No, that’s my name.”

“Oh. Oh, right! I remember the posters. Man, that was a really messed-up time. For you more than anyone, I guess.” He’d started to shuffle the cards without appearing to notice, his fingers blurring as the redbacks flashed in the dark. “Do you want to sit down?”

She glanced at the child. His gaze was fixed on the rippling cards. She moved a cautious distance from him, and huddled on the stone.

“So how have you been?” Jack asked. “I mean, what have you been doing?”

“Surviving.”

“That makes sense. I heard you disappeared after crossing off everyone on the List.” He stopped shuffling the cards, fanned them out, ran a thumb across their creases. “You were a legend, you know. For a little while. Then everyone else started, um, dying.”

She said nothing.

“Did you find anyone else? Since you came back?”

“Mostly mutants. One person.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s dead.”

“Oh. Okay. I guess he must have tried to…okay.” He clutched the cards to his chest. “I’ve been looking, too. Surprised we never ran into each other until now. Or maybe not. Olathe’s a big place.”

“It is.”

“It’s okay, really. I’m okay. I was on my own most of the time anyway. It’s why I learned how to do this.” He gave the cards another quick shuffle. “Figured if I could do some cool tricks I’d, you know, make some friends.”

“Did you?”

“No. Yes. Kind of. I was with some people, for a while.” He raised his head up just enough to look at her out the corner of his eye. “They were actually looking for you. Following this big guy named Brad.”

She was some distance from the fire. Her face was veiled in shadow. She was certain that her expression betrayed nothing.

“I wasn’t with them for that long,” he said, and lowered his head again. “It wasn’t much fun. Actually, it was kind of horrible. But I still think about it a lot. I get nostalgic over it.” His mouth twitched again. “I know how pathetic that sounds.”

“What happened?”

“I ran away. When everyone else was asleep. Everything was…it was getting too scary for me.” The cards bent in his grip. “I heard what happened to everyone later. Not just Brad, but Terry, Birdie, Nern…sorry. You don’t know any of these people.” Buddy was silent. “It’s just, they were weird, but they weren’t really bad people. I guess that’s why I’m still around. Just trying to find more people like that.”

Jack sighed and ran both hands through his hair. His fingers came away clotted with filth. He looked at Buddy and tried to smile.

“They’ve got to be out there, right?” he said. “Somewhere, still. I mean, you killed everyone who came trying to…you know, get their hands on you, and that was most of Olathe anyway, so anyone left over can’t be so bad.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But I haven’t found anyone.”

“But you’re trying, right? You think things’ll get better. That’s why you’ve got that little guy there.” He gestured at the child. “I can tag along, if you want. I lost most of my stuff but I can still do a lot of card tricks, your baby might like…”

He trailed off. The cards spilled from his hands as his eyes widened, staring at something over her shoulder. Buddy then noticed the scraping on the stone and turned around to see Brad’s face loom large, Brad pushing his bulk further and further into their hideaway.

Jack said, “That’s-”

“It’s nothing,” she said, backing up anyway. “It’s safe. I can control them. But this one doesn’t listen. That’s all. I don’t know why. He doesn’t always listen.”

“But it’s-”

“It’s no one. He’s no one.”

Brad stopped moving and Jack stood up and shuffled past Buddy, toward Brad, his pale long-fingered hands grasping through the dark. Buddy watched uncomprehending as he fell to his knees in front of Brad as though in this meagre firelight the mutant were some forgotten and crepuscular idol. Buddy heard him weeping. He appeared to be apologizing for something.

Then all in one movement Brad’s mouth yawned open wide and Buddy sprang to her feet and grabbed for the trumpet but then there was a meaty crunching sound and Jack tumbled over, head gone, blood spurting tarry from the stump. Those long-fingered hands twitching as though attempting to shuffle their cards once again. Brad’s beard was laced with blood and as she stared on he swallowed the head without the need to chew.

“Why?” she asked. “Why did you do that?” She looked down at the body. “Who was he?”

Brad gave no answer. For a moment she thought of striking him but she knew that would be useless; his scar-raddled body was so thick with fat that it was like beating a mattress.

In the end she blew her trumpet again and guided him out of the cave, leaving Jack’s body where it fell. His cards, too, remained where they were, scattered between the burning barrel and the charred mutant in the corner. Some time after she left the fire guttered, and flickered, and went out, and the maw of darkness closed over them all.  

*             *             *

She found nothing in the construction yards, where the endless girders stood straight and sturdy as ever, the ceaseless sun not even allowing them the luxury of rust.

She found nothing in that faraway warehouse where a discarded revolver lay in the corner and the concrete was stained black with blood and petrified flecks of brain.

She found nothing in the wrestling ring, canvas dry-rotted to tatters, ropes sagging and undone, bell broken and hanging like a loosened tooth.

She found nothing in her childhood home, where the cellar choked her with claustrophobia and a makeshift rug lay on the dirt to hide the stain where she’d cut her first throat.

She found nothing.

The child grew larger. His hair thick as crowfeathers. Her milk had dried to droplets. He still would not cry but sometimes she felt his belly shudder with hunger beneath her hand. Even rations were becoming harder to find. She thought of carving chunks off the mutants slouching in her wake but some part of her still believed that was a line yet to be crossed. Her stomach yet rebelled at the idea of that tainted meat.

The Joy in her poncho began to weigh her down nearly as much as the child. The pouch bulging to its rim. Even now the pills were unthinkable. She took some small comfort in banishing that need entirely but it was only small comfort nonetheless.

She began to feel watched. Not by the mutants’ vacant gazes. Something with intent. A presence stalking in her shadow. Paranoia unspooled in her. She would huddle in the caves and watch the entrances as though staring down a white and unblinking eye, waiting for some silhouette to cross her path. None came.

Until.

She was pushing through another stretch of desert when atop a plateau she saw it. A figure standing on the cliff face like a flaw in the stone. Too far away to make out the face but it was holding something long and thin so that its outline appeared to have one terribly misproportioned arm. She saw it and stopped in her tracks and when the figure did not move she unlaced the trumpet and blew, one long note that rolled through the emptiness and made all the mutants shiver. The figure strolled around the side of the cliff face and was gone.

She pressed on and saw no prints. What she did see was another cave, low-ceilinged and shallow enough for the glow of the fire within to be visible from the outside. She turned to the mutants. After a moment’s consideration, she raised the trumpet again and commanded them to be still.

Buddy holstered the instrument and flexed her fingers. It had been some time since her meeting with the bartender. Still, even with the child in her arm, she was confident that whatever was inside could be no threat. She stepped inside and when her eye adjusted to the new light what she discovered made her mind go blank.

It was a small scrapwood fire that had already burned down to coals, a circle of red flaring gently like an alarm in the dark. The light shone off brown bottleglass as the person sprawled there raised it and took several deep gulps. Face and limbs slender, black hair cut short, body clad in a poncho that may have once been white but was now crusted with so many strata of dirt and soot and blood that the original fabric only flashed through like bone beneath a gash. Against one arm was propped a long rifle, bolt-action, its barrel tarnished and weathered but free of rust. It seemed to wink at Buddy as the cave’s inhabitant lowered the bottle, and smiled at her.

“Took you long enough,” the woman said, and offered the bottle. “Want a drink?”


	3. The Friend

For a time, there was no movement from either of the women. Then, the one with the bottle shrugged, guzzled the rest of it, and flung it against the wall. Buddy flinched as it smashed against the stone and sprayed glass that caught the firelight and looked briefly like blood, dark and arterial.

“You don’t like that sound?” the woman said. “I love that sound. When I was a kid I’d break these things all day. But the glass travels far, you know. That’s how I got this.” She turned her head and pointed out a thin white scar on her cheek, “and this.” She pointed to another scar just beneath her eye. “Almost went blind that second time. But,” she added, grinning, “I still do it. Just got to stand a little further back, that’s all.”

Buddy remained where she was. She flipped through a deck of possible questions to ask and settled on the one that sounded the least foolish:

“Where did you come from?”

“Somewhere you haven’t been. Going back, soon. Want to come with me?”

She was young but her voice was strangely husky as though she were speaking through a throatful of smoke. Her face may have been scarred but it was also free of the stress-lines that Olathe seemed to chew into everyone, including Buddy herself, and she only looked more amused at Buddy’s refusal to answer.

“Okay,” she said. “I guess this is the part where I give you incentive. They told me you’d like this, God knows why.” She pulled something off her hip and lobbed it over the fire and it skidded to a halt at Buddy’s feet. “Try that.”

Buddy looked at the object and back at the woman and back at the object again, and finally bent low and examined it further. It was a flask, firmly capped. With child still in arm she picked it up and fumbled the cap open with her free hand. She sniffed the mouth of the bottle. It smelled of very little.

She took a sip and tasted water, cool and clean.

“Careful,” the woman remarked as Buddy tipped the flask back. “Chug it too fast and you’ll just hack it all out again.”

Buddy wasn’t listening. Over time she’d felt the dirtiness of everything she ate and drank build up inside her – the thin scum of grease on the meat, the corrosive tang of the alcohol and flat coagulated sodas. Now it felt like that inner dermis of accumulated filth was being scraped clean by the drink. If she were to take her lips away from the bottle she would bend double and vomit forth a black tide of sludge that would fill this cave up to her ankles.  Water dripped and ran down her chin as she gulped and carved trails through the dust on her poncho. It was only when she spotted out of the corner of her eye the inquisitive stare of the child that she pulled the flask away. She took him by the chin and tipped the flask into his mouth and his eyes widened further, small frail fingers reaching up to paw at the metal as though he wished to coax out that flavor.

When the flask ran dry she capped it again and held it to her chest. The woman had her palm in her chin.

“Well,” she said. “Guess you didn’t want to leave anything for me.”

Buddy threw the flask back over the fire and the woman reached out and caught it.

“There’s more where I’m going. ’course, now I’m not sure I’ll get there. Long walk. A girl gets thirsty.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid,” said Buddy, wiping her chin.

“Are you?”

“If you want something then ask for it.”

“I want to know if you’re stupid.”

“What do you think.” Spoken through grit teeth.

“Everyone’s heard about the Big Girl. Even me. Even the people I’m with. But I don’t know what to think about her.”

“What people are you talking about?”

“You say you’re not stupid but you ask some real dumb questions.” The last coals were starting to fade. “I’m here ‘cause they told me to be and I’d just as rather hit the road again and try to find another beer before I dry up and blow away. So either kill me, follow me, or fuck off.”

Everyone Buddy had known had been a coiled spring. Bodies and words all screaming with tension. Ulterior motives were always squirming under their words – either they wanted her for her body or to be some incubator for the better days they’d lost.  Even Brad had always shuddered with that inner pressure. But there was no such sensation from this woman. If anything she looked ready to fall asleep sitting up.

At last Buddy said, “I’ve got beer.”

“Cold?”

“No.”

“Hmm.” Her fingers curled; for a moment her stance was philosophical. “All right. Let’s go.”

She shouldered the rifle and stood and walked around the fire and past Buddy without hesitation. She paused at the cave’s mouth and looked over her shoulder. “You’ve got a name, right?”

“It’s Buddy.”

“Okay.” She started to walk again.

“What’s your name?”

The woman stopped and turned around, expression puzzled. Then she sighed, and rolled her eyes, and smacked her forehead with the flat of her hand.

“Right. Yes. Jesus. Sorry. Never actually had to introduce myself to anyone before.” She lowered her hand. “I’m Lisa.”

There was a long silence.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

“No,” said Buddy. “Nothing.”

By the time she rose and started off the woman had already disappeared into the glare outside. She emerged into the daylight to find Lisa standing silhouetted against the mad tangle of flesh that Buddy had brought along.

“This is easily the most disgusting god damned thing I’ve seen.”

She sounded delighted. Buddy watched as she reached out with her rifle and prodded one mutant – squat and fish-eyed, torso all but consumed by ripples of accordioned skin, its fingers little more than stubs poking like worms out of that fat. The gunbarrel pressed deep into its stupefied face and receded, leaving a noticeable divot. When Lisa turned she was grinning ear to ear.

“Always wanted to see one of these things up close,” she said.

“Here they are,” Buddy replied.

“How’d you get them to keep calm?”

“With this.” She patted the trumpet at her side “It’s complicated.”

Buddy and walked over to Brad. From the rucksacks draped across his back she extracted a bottle of beer and tossed it over to Lisa, who caught it one-handed and popped the cap open with her thumb. After several long gulps she smashed the bottle on the dirt and the remaining beer fizzled and frothed as she wiped her mouth and belched.

“That’s enough. Don’t want to overdo it. I was bullshitting you about the water, by the way.” She lifted her poncho and underneath Buddy saw a roughsewn belt upon which several more flasks dangled in addition to other relics – a notebook, a compass, several twinkling rifle shells.

“But thanks,” she continued, and strolled past Buddy towards Brad. She reached out to pat him on his bald head. “And thank _you_ , big guy-”

Buddy grabbed her and pulled back hard just as Brad lurched forward and snapped his jaws shut. Lisa staggered away, eyes wide, and just barely avoided collapsing in the dust. She gasped for breath and then laughed.

“I thought you said they were calm.”

“They don’t always listen. That one especially.”

“Maybe he’s sick of carrying all your shit.” Buddy said nothing. “Anyway, you can ditch ‘em here. They’ll just slow us down.”

“They’re coming with us.”

“Why?” She gestured with the rifle. “Protection? Afraid I’m gonna try to pop you in the head?”

“No. It’s because.” She trailed off. In her travels she had struggled with her reason for nurturing this crippled entourage and this was the first time she had been called about to put it into words. “I thought they were all that was left of us.”

Lisa stared at her. Then she shrugged and strapped the rifle across her back.

“Fair enough. Let’s go.”

Buddy watched her set off and then unstrapped her horn and woke the mutants from their stupor. They shambled after the women, Lisa leading the pack, then Buddy, then Brad.

It was clear to Buddy that Lisa was used to moving with more speed and stealth than this. Her gait was easygoing but uneven, constantly correcting her step as if she was unused to traversing the country with others in tow, and she kept ducking her head low and turning it this way and that, ever scanning the horizon. She didn’t know how long Lisa had shadowed her. Her greeting had suggested that Buddy had only learned of her presence because Lisa had wished it so. In the desert sun her streaked white poncho looked like some hallucination. Only the bluesteel gunbarrel bobbing behind her seemed solid.

Eventually she halted and held up a hand. Buddy stopped and Lisa pointed to some indistinct point in the distance. Buddy squinted at it until her eye watered and eventually made out a lone shack in the sand.

“Passed that place by when I was tracking you,” she said. “Don’t think I’ve been there before. Give me a minute to pick it over. You can wait with them.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“What, don’t trust me?”

“No.”

“Hm. All right.”

The shack was distinct only in its loneliness. Besides that, it was the same shoddy amalgamation of wood and siding and tarpaper as numerous others. Lisa unslung her rifle and opened the door slowly with the flat of her hand. It made only the barest creak. She gazed into the interior and stepped inside.

“Yeah, it’s safe,” she called. “Got a cold one here, though.”

Buddy followed her in. The child winced a bit at the stifling heat that poured through the doorway. He idly stuck a fist in his mouth and sucked at it.

The sun shot through the cracks in the walls and they illuminated little of interest. Heaps of trash, a filthy mattress, more empty bottles. The corpse of a man, fat and balding, lay on the mattress with revolver in hand. The nearby wall was tattooed with his brains. Lisa was bent low over him, rifling through his pockets.

“You have anything for me, buddy? Not you,” she said to Buddy, and then stood up. “Guess not.”

She went through the rest of the shack with a practiced air. There was something feral in her movement. She rummaged through the trash and withdrew a hunk of jerky, then licked and shrugged and took a bite. She shook the discarded bottles to detect the presence of any liquid and sniffed at the ones that sloshed only to wrinkle her nose and throw them away again. She prodded the heaps with her rifle stock as though expecting insects to crawl forth from them.

“Christ, no one’s got anything worth taking anymore. You’re not feeding everything you find to those things outside, are you?”

“They don’t eat.”

“Really? Guess they chew people up for the hell of it, then.” She overturned a heap of magazines and most of them fell as one congealed lump, dislodging a deep and meaty stink.

“I don’t need to tell you what that smell is,” said Lisa.

“No.”

“Well, someone had to tell me. When I first started making salvage runs out here I had to ask why every damn place I went stank like that. I was young. Imagine the looks on their faces, trying to explain it. Made for an interesting day.” She squatted on the ground and prodded the floor with her gun. “Uh oh. Look what we got here.”

Buddy approached and saw the pills gleaming blue in the dust. Three or four, scummed with semen.

“He must’ve forgotten he had them,” said Lisa. “You ever try this stuff?”

“Yes.”

Buddy reached into her poncho and withdrew the pouch and dropped the pills inside. Lisa watched, mouth slightly open.

“Is that-”

“Yes.”

“That’s all-”

“Yes.”

“Holy shit.”

“We should go.”

“How much of that have you actually taken?”

“None of it. I keep it with me. So no one else will take it.” She replaced the pouch. “It’s not worth it.”

“Speaking from experience, huh.” Lisa remained squatted on the ground, staring up at her. “What was it like?”

Buddy didn’t answer at first but Lisa’s expression was earnest and she didn’t appear in any hurry to move.

“It helped me concentrate,” she said. “I could keep going, no matter how badly I got hurt. I didn’t think about the pain. Only about what I wanted. Then it got harder to think about anything else.” She turned and looked at the man’s corpse, sad and deflated, turning grey. “I guess eventually you stop thinking at all.”

“Any idea why you didn’t end up like your friends out there?”

“There was a cure. It stopped me from changing. It’s a long story.”

“Feel like telling it?”

“No.”

“Okay.” She still didn’t get up. The planks creaked beneath her feet. “What did you want?”

“I don’t know. To be strong. To be free.”

“Guess you got it.”

Buddy said nothing.

“It’s a step up from what all of these assholes wanted, at least. I watched a bunch of these mutants from a safe distance. If they weren’t chowing down on something they were trying to fuck it.” She rapped the ground with her riflebutt as if condemning them all. Then she said, “I wonder what I’d want. I get thirsty a lot. Maybe I’d just wander around looking for beer.”

“I doubt it.”

“Just a big pair of lips with legs attached, walking into bars.”

“Okay.”

“Slurping up whatever they have.”

“Enough.”

“Slurp, slurp, slurp.”

“I’m leaving now.”

They left the shack and resumed their track. Lisa seemed satisfied with what conversation she had stirred up and did not stop or speak again. The child for once grew restless. He squirmed in Buddy’s grip. His hair was plastered to his scalp with sweat. Buddy had not nursed him in almost a full day.

The noontime sky overhead darkened abruptly to dusk as though responding to some heavenly alarum. The light all gone red. On the horizon Buddy saw the fragmented sun in mid-setting and when they walked a little further and came across a great dry hole she came to a halt.

“I’ve been here before,” she said.

“Okay. So have I.” Lisa kept walking. “What about it?”

Buddy approached the edge of the hole. The child made small sounds of protest into her arm. His lips were growing chapped. Here he had spoken his first and only words.

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just someplace I remember.”

Lisa stepped up beside her and gazed into the hole. They stood in parallel silhouetted against that light like memorials.

“It looks nice,” she conceded.

“Yes.”

“Think this all used to be full of water, or something?”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t talk much.”

“I’m not used to it,” she said. “There hasn’t been anyone to talk to.”

“Heard you were traveling with Rando for a little while.”

“Yes.”

“What was he like?”

“Probably different than how you heard,” Buddy said quietly.

“You didn’t talk to him much either, then.”

“No. I was on Joy. By the time I stopped it was too late.”

“You kill him?”

The question was flat and uninterested but Buddy took too long to answer. “I saw him die.”

Silence after that. Lisa stretched and ran her finger across the rifle strap. She strummed it like a guitar.

“Hey,” she said. “You ever notice how when you’re little, everything seemed bigger? Like how you’re in a room growing up and as you get older it feels like it can’t even hold you.”

“Sounds familiar.” Brad’s cellar had quickly turned from her whole world to a stifling cell. The scent of mushrooms and stale beer.

“It’s like that for me, where I came from. Where I’m going. But out here, everything seems to keep getting bigger. Feels like I need to walk further and further to get anywhere. You think that’s just me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Everyone tells me that the Flash broke the world into pieces. Maybe those pieces are all flying apart from each other. And no one can say where or why.” She kicked dirt into the hole. “If it is my imagination then I wonder what it means.”

“You tell me.”

“It’s a fucked-up world, Buddy.”

“It is what it is.”

“And that’s the truth.” She punched Buddy gently on the arm. “Come on. Not much further.”

Buddy turned and watched her walk off. She slowly flexed the arm Lisa had touched.

They walked on. They passed the desiccated remains of Roddy Derringer without comment. The sky lightened again, temperature rising. The sun was now nailed directly overhead like a coin in mid-flip and its light lay on them like weight. Buddy sweated through her poncho.

Lisa came to a halt. “Okay.”

In one smooth movement she shrugged off her rifle and flipped it around and carved a straight line in the dirt. She stepped on the opposite end of this border and stared down Buddy, the gun resting on her shoulder.

“From here on it’s just you and me. And that, I guess.” The rifle swung down and pointed at the child. “They stay here.” The rifle pointed at the mutants.

“No,” said Buddy.

“This isn’t a yes or no thing. If they don’t stay then you don’t go. I’ll take off and you won’t catch up. If you try and chase me then you’ll get lost, and that’ll be it for you. This isn’t the place you can find your way through on your own. Haven’t been here before, right?”

The land was flat and nondescript but the ground was flecked with some sort of mica that gave everything a vicious shine and the heat was almost unbearable. If Buddy had indeed stumbled on this country then she would have quickly changed her route. The child was whimpering. His bare flesh reddened in the sun.

“I don’t give a shit either way,” said Lisa. “But the people I’m with will go ballistic if they see all these things coming. They’ll shoot you before you ever get close. Me too, maybe.”

Buddy held the child closer and tried to shade him with her scrawny frame. Eventually she said, “Do you have any more water?”

Lisa brought out another flask with her free hand and tossed it over the line. Buddy caught it and took a deep drink and then gave more to the child. His chin and cheeks sparkled with wet. When he finished drinking his low cries had ceased. Buddy tossed the flask back.

“Now you owe me another beer,” Lisa said, replacing it. “Just keep that in mind.”

Buddy brought up the trumpet and faced the mutants. She played her song and they shuddered and stilled. Brad remained at the head of the group. His stare felt accusatory.

When she turned back around Lisa had already started off. Buddy followed.

There was something wrong with this land. After a little while Buddy glanced over her shoulder to see how far they had gone and she could still see the ragged outlines of the mutants she had left behind but when she turned around it took her a moment to find Lisa again. She seemed to coalesce out of the air. The ground’s shine was relentless. All was pulled apart in the glitter. The earth appeared to ripple and warp like fabric beneath her step. Buddy’s eyes fought and swam in the wavering heat and these crashing waves of mirage. Even the child had turned and buried his head in Buddy’s sweatlogged and reeking poncho rather than lay eyes on these surroundings. Lisa’s rifle was again the only thing that seemed solid and Buddy had to fight the urge to reach out and seize hold of it, to moor herself.

“You alright back there?”

“I’m fine.” The words were forced.

“Still a ways to go.”

Now and then they came across corpses, skins dried and tanned as leather and stretched tight across the bones. Their eyeballs long boiled away to nothing and fallen away into black sockets along with whatever hallucinations had undone them. Buddy tried to use these remains as landmarks but her eyes flickered and they were gone.

She spied a figure in the distance, over Lisa’s shoulder. She leaned forwards and squinted through her watering eye and the shape became a tall man in a black mantle. Like a lone crow standing vigil. His face was crazed with scars and the mangled tissue had pulled his mouth up in a permanent mirthless grin. He stared and stared and said nothing and did not disappear no more how many times she blinked.

“Dusty,” she said.

“A little, yeah,” Lisa replied. “It’s the wind. Don’t keep your mouth open.”

The dead man seemed to be everywhere she looked. Lisa stopped walking but didn’t turn around.

“You’re breathing awful loud back there,” she said. “Are you freaking out?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not.” She sighed. “They probably wouldn’t want me to tell you this, but whatever. The trick is not to look at the ground. Look there.”

She pointed up and Buddy followed her finger but saw nothing of note. Just the unending blue sky and those deadlocked and useless clouds.

“It’s the clouds,” said Lisa. “That’s the secret. See how they’re getting skinnier at one end? Kind of like something’s tugging on them?”

Buddy looked closer and agreed this was so.

“That’s the direction we’re going in. Keep looking up. Watch where the clouds go thin. The ground will just give you a splitting headache and get you walking in circles.”

“Okay.”

“Found a guy once who wandered out here. His body was lying in a sort of little circular trench. He’d just walked around in a circle for God knows how long and then fallen down and died.”

“What’s through here?”

“Easier to show you.”

“How’d you find out how to cross?”

“Someone else told me.” She hitched the rifle’s strap further up on her shoulder. “You’ll have to ask her.”

They trudged through the phantasmagoric wastes until the earth began to change. It blackened beneath Buddy’s feet. Darkening in spots the color of coal as if the land itself had scabbed. As they walked the black spots grew and grew until they were all that was left of the ground and in that strange surface were flaking strips of pale yellow like diseased and mottled skin. The clouds multiplied. They appeared to converge and descend. All the world going grey.

Buddy began to shiver. The sun had been buried completely by the clouds, which had joined into a thick sheet that ate the sky completely. A clammy mist clung to her and obscured the surrounding earth. Lisa had turned nearly invisible; only the debris on her clothing and the spark of her riflebarrel guided Buddy on. All was silent beyond silence. Her ears rang with the muted air.

Then, the back of her neck felt wet.

Rain.

It was a soft and steady drizzle from above. Raindrops nested in her hair and carved trailways through the dirt on her skin. The child’s head twisted this way and that, eyes agape. He flinched as the raindrops landed on his eyelids. He struggled to catch one on his tongue.

She followed the sound of Lisa’s metronomic footsteps and as she looked around she saw that this was not the world in which they had been. Through the curling mists she saw roads similar to the roads upon which they had walked but between these roads and their road was nothing at all, just gray and empty space full of fog, and she risked a few steps to the side and peered over the edge of their road to see only fog below. As though the land itself had fled to some smothered and inscrutable hideaway. The adjacent roads were warped, helixed, their undersides caked thick with mud and stalactites. They terminated abruptly like tongues of the long dead. They appeared to go nowhere at all.

In the distance now something loomed. A column of broken rock that rose from the deep mists, its outer walls cracked and bending outward like a flower dried to petrification. Its surface glimmered with rainwater. Near the top Buddy saw some rough structure, a lean-to or a shack, and thought she spied the gleam of metal in that dwelling but then a shadow manifested behind that gleam and bore it away and was gone.

The road ended at an opening in this column, wide enough to admit ten people side by side. Lisa passed through it without hesitation and Buddy followed. As they crossed through this threshold the air was rent by a sound. A pulsing, metallic rattle.

The mist was thinner here and Buddy witnessed where Lisa had brought them. The inside of this stone column was completely hollow and within was a vast circular space dotted with rough-made tarpaper and sheetmetal shacks, the ground sandy and soaked black by rain. Rain coursed down the slanting sides of the column and was swallowed by bent pipes and gutters staked right into the rock and rerouted the water away from the houses or down the cracks into the abyss, or into a number of metal drums that gathered the rainwater to the point of overflowing. The sides of the column interior were tiered like the levels of some malformed and halfborn quarry and on these upper lips of stone were more shacks, or open cave mouths leading into unknown blackness within the column walls. And all throughout this settlement were poles driven into the earth and festooned with all matter of junk – cutlery and junk jewelry, old tin plates and broken bells – all joined together by lengths of rope, coursing through the whole of the structure. This rope terminated in the upper reaches of the village and Buddy turned and saw it being jerked by someone hidden, causing all the junk to rattle with this alarum, this chaotic chime.

And at the very center of the village was a building. A squat, flatroofed and unimpressive thing, standing in the middle of a craved and paved lot. This building’s front walls were blackened by large squares of plastic and it stared out blindly across the lot and at Buddy and Lisa. A wide, long roof covered this building and the lot and in the lot itself were several metallic structures, the purpose of which Buddy could not divine. They were bulky rectangular things bearing thick tubes and nozzles on their sides like strange gunslingers, and their faces were covered with numbers and dials, all of them sheened with scum and rust.

Amidst these contrivances was a rocking chair and in the chair was a woman. Ancient beyond anyone Buddy had seen, her face like a twisted root and her eyes consumed by crow’s feet. She smiled vacantly and rocked back and forth, back and forth, and her lap was covered by a thick black blanket and on this blanket was the shine of a twelve-gauge shotgun that she gripped and stroked like a sleeping cat.

The alarm went on. The village’s entrances began to fill. Faces poking out, obscured by mist. Buddy clutched the child closer. Lisa yawned, long and loud.

At last the door to the central building opened and another woman hobbled out. She looked younger than the woman in the chair but still terribly aged, and made worse by the great grey unkempt mane of hair that floated around her head and the horrorshow of scarring on her face. Her right eye and much of the surrounding skin was consumed by pink burnflesh that traveled halfway up her scalp, so her hair hung lopsided as she hobbled towards Lisa and Buddy. She wore a faded yellow rain slicker and the rain gossiped on her shoulders as she stepped out of the building’s shelter. She stood before them. Her eye lanced through them both.

She leaned forward and sniffed, and her lip peeled back in disgust.

“Jesus Christ, girl,” she said. “Now, of all times?”

“I only had one or two,” Lisa said cheerily. “Two or three.”

“Were you drinking ‘em or bathing in ‘em? One of these days your useless ass’ll get et and the mutant who does it’ll get tipsy too, mark my words.” That eye swiveled towards Buddy. “Then again. Maybe not.”

She took a shuffling step in Buddy’s direction. Buddy held firm. Bent as the old woman was, she barely came up to Buddy’s chest. Yet there was something in the set of her jaw and the shine of her glare that spoke to some potency in this crone beyond her burnt and broken frame.

Finally she said, “You looking at the scar?”

Buddy shrugged. It seemed the best response.

“You think it makes me look like some kind of badass?”

“There are lots of people with scars,” she said.

“Yes. And they don’t mean a thing. I got this one ‘cause of an accident with the gas pumps.” She stuck a thumb over her shoulder at those metal teeth sticking out from the lot. “So don’t look at the scar. The scar means I’m a fool. It’s the rest of you that counts. Right?”

After a moment, she nodded. She remembered Dusty telling her something similar. Right before Brad had laid waste to him and his entire gang. Lisa had stepped away from the two of them. She was stretching in the rain, pulling her soaked hair away from her own eyes.

“I notice you’re missing one of your own,” she went on. “How’d that happen, if I may ask?”

“It got cut out.”

“By who?”

“Some asshole.”

“Mm. No end of those, seems like. But you cut down on their number a bit. Right, Big Girl?”

“Her name’s Buddy,” Lisa called.

“There’s worse names,” the woman said. “I’m Ada. For some reason everyone here acts like I’m the boss.” She gazed around the village. “As you can see, they don’t do shit unless I wake ‘em up.”

She rose her voice at the assembled figures. Despite her wasted chest her shout was surprisingly strong, a throaty croak that arrowed through the falling rain.

“Can’t you all see we got a guest?” she called. “Get her dried off and show her to a damn mattress, already!”

“Hey, Ada,” said Lisa. “I’m heading out again tonight. Had a few spots I wanted to mark off.”

“Stick your head in a rainbarrel and sober up first.”

“Please. I can’t get buzzed walking with Buddy here.” Lisa winked. “She sucks out all the fun for miles.”

Buddy stared at her impassively and then panned the village again. The figures became clearer and all of them were women. They stood like gargoyles in the mists, some in shawls, some in slickers, some barechested with their wrinkled breasts hanging loose like crumpled paper bags. Their expressions were hidden by the twisting fog as though wiped to bare flesh. None of them would move.

“We’ll talk more later,” said Ada. “Let’s show you and the little one a little hospitality first. You deserve a rest.”

Buddy didn’t answer. She absently wiped water off the child’s hair and gazed at the assembled multitude. Lisa was saying something else but she didn’t hear. The air was cool and the water was sweet as she licked it off her cracked lips but in this oasis she felt the ground unsteady beneath her feet. As though she had stepped off the edge of that broken road and already plunged into the depths of something irrevocable.


	4. The Women

She awoke from a dream of water.

The weather here was just as unchanging as it was in Olathe, and that meant that the soft patter of raindrops never ceased – on the dirt, on the rooftops, on the shoulders of passersby. Buddy couldn’t get used to it. In Olathe she had slept in dark places out of the wind, so that the least sound would alert her. Now she kept bolting awake, convinced that the raindrops were the footsteps of some intruder.

She sat up and groaned and passed a hand over her face. She was in a small tinroofed shack on the periphery of the women’s settlement. Bare save for a candle, and a mattress in the corner, and a makeshift bed for the child crafted from a dresser drawer and a heap of old cloth. Buddy’s sodden poncho lay in a heap at the foot of the mattress like a dozing animal. The candlelight played over her bare skin and the one scarred and mangled breast and she gathered her own blankets around her and shivered.

Here was a life inverse from the one she knew. One filled with the desperate and debauched men, the other with these stern women. One maddeningly open, so that she had sometimes felt poisoned by the unending horizon in front of here, and one so walled and constricted that it seemed in a different world altogether. And while the survivors of Olathe had always been on the hunt for water, here there was always a need for flame.

The damp air wormed its way under her skin and the rain rendered scrapwood into useless heaps of pulp. And while that structure in the center of this settlement (the “station,” Lisa had offhandedly called it, before slinging her rifle back into her shoulder and disappearing back into Olathe’s scorched wastes) had once given gasoline in abundance, it had run dry years ago. The women still had gas laid by in some of the caves, the faded cans lining the walls like funereal offerings, but the flame it gave was shortlived and stinking. Nearly everything was disassembled to burn.

This candle was already starting to gutter. Buddy leaned over and pinched it out and sat there in the dark.

She had been shown to this room by a retinue of the women after Ada had disappeared back into the station. They were grim people but they had expressed some concern over her wounds, clucked briefly over the child. Lisa had followed behind them and remained when they had gone. She had stood silhouetted in the doorway, and her own clothes, rapidly whitening as the rain washed off the dust of Olathe, had gleamed like quartz in the dark.

“I’ll be back in a few days,” she’d said. “Ada will talk to you again, eventually. She wants you to want it, first. Stick around a while.” She’d turned. “Unless you have somewhere better to be.”

Buddy didn’t and so she was here.

The child slept. The susurrus of his breath rendered inaudible by the rain. One of the women had given her a bowl of some pale mash to feed him and Buddy had done so with her fingers. He’d resisted at first but then taken to it well enough. The nubs of his new teeth had scraped her skin.

She rose and put her poncho back on, wincing a bit at the feel of the cold wet cloth, and then picked up the child and tucked him under her arm. She felt the weight of both him and the Joy against her chest. The child yawned as she moved aside the tarp that passed for a doorway here and stepped outside.

In her dream she had been at the bottom of a hole amidst the shambolic mob of her Joy Mutants. The hole had been deep and the sky like a burning red coin high overhead. As she had tried to determine how she had gotten here, clawing her way across that moaning architecture of flesh and teeth, she had heard a distant roar and felt the air turn cold. And when she had looked up again she had seen a torrent of water stained crimson by that sweltering sky. That bloody spray, coming to drown them all for good.

*             *             *

After the world ended, the men of Olathe had given themselves all manner of strange new names. Roddy Derringer hadn’t introduced himself before his busy hands got him eaten alive, but if he had, Buddy wouldn’t have batted her eye. Dice Mahone, Tiger Man, Big Lincoln, or the famed Gary the Hot Soup – these meaningless alter egos, adopted as though their holders wanted to reshape themselves to better fit the meaningless dead-end world to come. Even most of her uncles had preferred nicknames. Brad had been characteristically quiet on the subject, but Buddy had always gotten the impression that he didn’t approve of the survivors’ new habit. Of their pointless, ornate play-acting.

The women did not take new names. Instead they discarded their surnames and carried what was left with them, clutching them like talismans. Lisa had said she had never needed to introduce herself to others before, and now Buddy understood why. Cloistered away in this blooming cliff, with no community but each other for years, the women all referred to themselves and each other with exhausted familiarity. So it went for Jo, the washerwoman, who had emerged like an apparition from her doorway and all but pulled Buddy inside.

“It’s not as though we can’t stand each other,” she said, pulling another tangle of fabric from the heap beside her. “We’ve just said all there is to say. How many times can you hear about someone’s hip problem before you want to break it? Look at me. Calluses so thick my hands’re fireproof.” This was the third time she had said this.

Jo was old, fat, mostly bereft of neck. She was naked from the waist up and glistening with sweat from the heat in the cave behind her, and she squatted amidst soiled pants and shawls and ponchos like a great pale toad. A washbasin and board were before her and as she scraped this latest fabric across it the rolls of flesh across her waist rippled and surged in mesmerizing patterns.

“Can you hear me back there?” she called. “Watch the baby’s eyes. They’re sensitive.”

Jo’s hut was built in front of a small but high-ceilinged cave crazed with clotheslines tied to outcroppings in the stone. Clothing hung from these lines and were dried by a barrel fire filled with scrapwood. The fire was started by a sprinkling of gasoline and the smoke stung Buddy’s own eye, but she took her time cleaning the child, who was in a spare washbasin with cloudy water up to the navel.

There had been obvious problems with the child and hygiene in Olathe. She’d done her best with handfuls of gauze and weak alcohol but it hadn’t been enough, and she thinned her lips now at the scaly patches of rash he had from the waist down. The child did not protest as she wiped him. He slapped the surface of the water with a fist.

She, too, was barechested, her poncho crumpled in the corner. She hadn’t let Jo touch it. No way to conceal the pills inside. But she had scrubbed her own skin as clean as she could and watched the water course black away from her body with fascinated disgust. A lifetime of dirt pooling at her feet.

She doused the fire with her washwater. When she emerged Jo was still talking. The plunging of her fists in and out of the water formed a backbeat to her grumble.

“-lost count of the years, not as though anyone volunteers, oh no, I suppose I could bring it up to Ada but my knees aren’t what they used to be and that slope is just a horror. Offer to clean some of their clothes and suddenly that’s all you ever do, you tell me what’s the sense of that, years and years of doing the same thing over and over because that’s what you did at the start. I hope you emptied the water into that barrel.”

Jo’s head swiveled on its folds. Her voice had turned pointed.

“I emptied it,” said Buddy.

She grunted and pointed to the child’s pants, lying at the foot of her own craggy and much-abused mattress. “I scrubbed and wrung those out the best I could. Was expecting more of a horrorshow than what I saw. Would prefer diapers but we’ve got none. Have yourself a seat and get him changed.”

Buddy was getting used to this – her percolating chatter with that final blunt command at the end. She sat on the squealing mattress and clothed the child. Jo resumed scrubbing.

“Most of them are wearing raincoats and such these days anyway,” she said. “Less work for me. You really ought to let me wash that rag of yours.”

“It’s fine.”

“You know best. Looks like it would fall apart in my hands anyway.” The water frothed. “Used to be I had to scrub those damned things by the dozen. Back when we were roaming out there.”

“You were in Olathe?”

“You wouldn’t want to hear it, I’m sure,” she said, and then told Buddy anyway.

In the beginning, when the afterimage of the Flash had faded and the men of Olathe were still wandering dazed and unbelieving at the absurdist desolation that had swept over the land, the women had emerged. They’d worn voluminous and shapeless garments stitched together by whatever they had on hand (“By me, of course, handy with a needle too, and a good thing with all these calluses”) hiding their faces and forms, and dragged behind them rattling claptrap barrows assembled from shelves and countertops and reclaimed tires. They had swept quickly through the wastes and loaded whatever they could into the carts and disappeared from where they’d come (“And through that awful desert, too, felt like my head was about to burst in that place, if it hadn’t been for our wheelmarks who knows what might have happened”). They had left bodies in their wake. They’d killed without hesitation.

“We knew what we were in for,” said Jo. “The men never did. Though they’d have been goddamned useless either way, I’m sure.”

“How did you know?” Buddy asked, but Jo ploughed over the question.

“It became harder over time, of course. The men spreading out. Couldn’t let any of them see us. That’s why we started to send scouts, to mark places to go, bring back little things every now and then. They always came back so filthy. Little Lisa especially. Sometimes I think she’d turn a bathtub black just by dipping her toe in it.”

“She told you where to raid.”

“She did. Not much need for that now. She keeps going out anyway. And who can blame her? Use your legs while they can bear up the weight, I say. You’ll miss your youth while it’s gone. Why are you still here?”

Again the scrubbing stopped and the eyes buried in that face’s soft clay drilled into her.

“Air in here is awful for a baby,” she said. “Go get something to eat. See Becky. She’s around. Go.”

Buddy considered asking for something more specific but those eyes narrowed further and she rose and left. The child’s clean skin felt smooth under her fingers. As she approached the doorway the scrubbing renewed.

“More holes, all the time,” Jo muttered. “I’m running out of thread.”

*             *             *

Becky, as it turned out, was an emaciated stick of a woman with a fluff of colorless hair and a genial smile that looked like it had been whittled into her face. She’d been at the mouth of a cave near Jo’s shack, beckoning for Buddy to come in. She had inquired after Buddy’s health and cooed over the child, and as they had entered the darkness Buddy did not failed to notice the long thin knife gleaming at the old woman’s waist.

Slime squished underfoot. The cave seemed to go right up to the edge of the settlement’s wall; at the far end tired gray light streamed in from cracks in the stone. The space was filled with mushrooms, sprouting on the walls or in clods of dirt squared off on the ground. Some faintly phosphorescent, some crammed together like bloated cilium. The air smelled like spiced mud.

“We knew right away that we could hardly survive on jerky and leftovers from the station,” said Becky – her voice was high and quavering, like a struck tuning fork. Buddy could almost feel the sound in her teeth. “And I had a little gardening experience, so I thought, goodness, why not? And look what we have now. They love this dreary weather.” She stroked a nearby mushroom’s cap. “Took a bit of work to separate out the edible ones, but everything you see here is safe. I won’t tell you what’s in the fertilizer.”

“Is this what you fed him?” she said, and hitched up the child.

“Oh, no, dear. Those were some old fruit preserves of mine. Mash them up and water them down and they make a tolerable baby food. I’d been saving them for just such an occasion.” Her voice darkened. “Took a bit longer than it should have, but oh well.”

She broke off a mushroom and held it out to Buddy, the cap round and milky as a cataract.

“Try this. It’s acceptable raw.”

She reached out, paused, then took the mushroom. She turned it over in her fingers. The filigree of its gills wimpled under her touch.

“Afraid it’s poison?” Becky asked cheerfully, and the stem bent under Buddy’s grip. “Don’t be. I know that the people here are a cold bunch – it’s this weather, it’s bad for the spirits even if it’s good for the mushrooms – but we’re happy to have you with us, Buddy.”

“Is that so.”

“It is so. I know it can be hard to make friends. Lisa is the same way. But let us give you this little something, at least.” She patted Buddy’s wrist. “It would be a nice change of pace from everyone out there trying to take things away.”

Buddy pulled her arm away but Becky’s smile was unwavering. After another long moment she put the mushroom in her mouth and chewed. It tasted of very little.

“I stew them, mostly,” said Becky. “Easier to feed everyone that way. A bit of salt and they turn out quite nice. I’ll holler for you when soup is up.”

“All right.”

“Just don’t let me catch you stealing or I’ll cut your pretty hands off.”

Neither her voice nor face had changed at all.

“I’d like to see you try,” Buddy said coolly, and Becky’s smile widened. She could almost hear the woman’s papery skin tear with the effort.

“None of us would want to see that, dear. But food is precious. We can’t just abide thieves.” She withdrew that long knife and sliced off another mushroom. “Even our own.”

She took a guess. “Lisa?”

“One or two I could have overlooked. But that girl was ripping them out in clumps. Leaving them on the ground to rot. Wasteful. So wasteful.” She popped the mushroom in her mouth and chewed, open-mouthed, clumps of soft wet matter falling out from between her lips. “But then we punished her a little, and she stopped. This is a good place. Orderly.”

She swallowed, and smiled again.

“Have a lovely evening, dear.”

Buddy stared for a moment longer, then left. When she reached the cave mouth she looked back and deep in the murk could still make out the pale flesh of the mushrooms. From within were more wet footsteps as Becky paced through that garden, humming a tune that sounded like it came from another world entire.

*             *             *

“Look at the light,” said Karen. “Don’t blink.”

She was middle-aged with a face framed by tight salt-and-pepper ringlets of hair and sagging cheeks pitted by the remnants of some ancient and cataclysmic acne. She had showed up at Buddy’s shack unannounced and taken her to another small hut that was furnished with a tarp-covered table and a dresser filled with all manner of trifling junk – lenses, twine, twists of metal for which Buddy had no name. She’d sat Buddy and the child down on this table and checked their health with a number of tests so random and half-hearted that Buddy wasn’t sure if this was for her benefit or for Karen’s own esoteric amusement. The woman looked like she hadn’t laughed in a hundred years.

She now held a lit match in front of Buddy’s functioning eye. The dancing flame made all their shadows convulse as she waved it back and forth. Buddy’s gaze followed the light.

“Seems to be working,” Karen said, and waved out the flame. “Can you read?”

“A little.”

“No, I mean can you make out letters. At a distance.”

“I don’t know. Never had to.”

“Maybe that was a stupid question.” She pulled back Buddy’s hair, exposing the scarred socket. “Someone really went to town on you here. No infection?”

“No.”

“What have you been using to cover the hole?”

“Bandages. Anything I can cut up. I pour whiskey on them first.”

“You should have a head full of disease, the way you’ve been treating that thing.” Karen let the hair fall. “But since you don’t, you should get a proper eyepatch. See if Jo can do something. You’ve met her, I assume.” Buddy nodded. “Sorry about that. She never shuts up.” She took Buddy’s wrist and examined the traceries of scarflesh leading up and into her clothes. “I’m guessing you look like hamburger meat under that poncho, too. Any of the wounds hurting? Red? Sore?”

“No.”

“I’ll take your word for it. Are they all flesh wounds or are you missing any other parts besides that eye?”

“My nipple.” Karen stared. “It was cut off. To prove a point. I think.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.” She turned her attention to the child. “Let’s just look at this one.”

Buddy gripped her knees tight as Karen ran her spindly hands over the child’s skin. She had never let anyone else touch him before. The child, too, seemed to recognize that these hands were not Buddy’s own – he whimpered and squirmed as Karen gently pinched his arms, his cheeks, the folds of his belly.

“Not as thin as I’d have figured,” she said. “What’s he been eating? Candy?”

“I’ve breast-fed him,” Buddy said.

“For how long?”

“I stopped about a week ago.”

“So he’s, what, five or six months?”

“No. A year, maybe.”

Karen turned to her, slowly. “That doesn’t make sense. You should have dried up a long time ago.”

“I guess no one told me that.”

“I guess not.” Her curls bounced as she sighed and shook her head. “The hell do I know anyway. I’m not a doctor.”

“You’re not?”

“No. I had three boys. You ever seen three boys under the same roof? They kicked the shit out of each other every day. Either you learn some first aid or you let them kill each other off.”

“Where are they now?” Buddy asked, and realized too late it was a foolish question.

“Don’t know. Dead, hopefully.” She glanced again at Buddy. “Don’t look at me like that, little girl.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You’ve seen what it’s like out there. Every mother wants what’s best for her children. So I want my children to be dead.”

That buried any further conversation. Buddy watched as Karen repeated the match-flame test with the child’s eyesight. She checked his pulse. She lifted his hair and examined his scalp. She held tight onto the top of his head and stuck two fingers into his mouth. Buddy saw his cheeks bulge as Karen probed.

“Teething pretty badly,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Has he been crying at all? Normally they never shut up when the teeth start to come in.”

“He’s barely made any sound,” said Buddy. “He talked once. That’s all.”

“Normally I’d say there’s something wrong with him,” Karen sighed, and withdrew her fingers with a _pop._ “But these days, maybe that just means he’s smarter than the rest of us. Crying wouldn’t do anyone any good.”

She hobbled over to the dresser and withdrew another match and a cigarette that looked like the discarded entrail of something long dead. She struck the match and lit the cigarette and leaned back and smoked. The air grew cloudy and stinking.

“You’re both healthy even though you shouldn’t be,” she said. “I just don’t understand it. You end-of-the-world kids. You don’t make any sense.”

“I was born before.”

“Close enough so that it doesn’t make any difference. Lisa was born right after and she’s the same way. All of us are getting old. With this weather, one good bout of pneumonia would put all of us down for good. But she’s never even gotten a sniffle. That’s not even mentioning all that shit she drinks.”

“She was born after you came here?”

“Yes.” Karen’s cigarette flared, staining her face a witchlight orange. “You wondering where her mother is?”

Buddy said nothing.

“She’s in the ground,” said Karen. “Lisa killed her. We all did.”

No response, except from the rain.

“Breech birth,” Karen went on. “Means she came out the wrong way ‘round. I wasn’t any sort of doctor. I said so. I shouldn’t have been in charge of it. You’ve never seen so much blood. Not even you.” The cigarette bobbed and weaved. “But Ada wanted that baby out whatever it took, so in the end we hacked her open to get it out. We pulled her apart like a plastic bag. Lisa was so covered with blood no one could get a grip on her. Gagging on it as she tried to cry. We had to leave her in the mud. Watching the rain wash her clean. That was our life. That’s how we are.”

Karen hadn’t seemed to blink once during this. Buddy did not look away but slowly she reached out and pulled the child closer.

“What were you expecting when you came here?” Karen asked.

“I wasn’t expecting anything. I didn’t know where I was going.”

“Good. Because now you know. Now you know what it is.” She crushed out her cigarette on the dresser. “You’re too late. It doesn’t matter what Ada says. You came too late.”

The woman seemed to be collapsing on herself. Buddy rose and left without another word.

“I hope my boys are dead,” Karen called after her. Her voice quavered and whether she was on the verge of laughter or tears Buddy couldn’t say. “I hope they’re dead. I hope you killed them yourself.”

*             *             *

She hadn’t been invited up here. Instead she had traced back the tattered lengths of rope connecting the settlement’s makeshift alarms to the upper tier, where she found a lean-to constructed of old struts and discarded plastic siding. The sentry there had been flipping through a romance paperback grown sopping and bloated as one of the mushrooms. Without looking up she had offered Buddy a book and a cigarette. Buddy had declined both.

Her name was Luz and she was a tanned and rangy woman with a bent beak of a nose and a face that looked as though it had been whittled out; she could have been anywhere between thirty and sixty. Her little guardpost was stacked with books and cigarette cartons, many of the latter long empty. The rope was tied to a stake driven into the ground and lay coiled there like a discarded snakeskin.   

She turned her book’s pages with a jeweler’s delicacy and some of the pages still came apart in her fingers. Her rifle lay neglected in the corner.

“Shit,” she said mildly, as another wet page tore. “These are hard to find, too. When I went out to Olathe all we dug up were magazines. You know what I mean.”

Buddy indicated that she did.

“Wish I could go out there again,” she said. “Is there really no one left?”

“I don’t know. I was still looking when Lisa found me.”

“Lisa, Lisa.” Buddy waited for her to say more but she didn’t. She simply muttered the name like a warding and went back to her book.

“Is she coming back soon?” Buddy asked, eventually.

“She comes and goes. You can sit down.”

“I’m okay, thanks.”

“Suit yourself.” She sighed and shut her book and stretched in the mud, her back bending like a cat’s.  “God, this is pointless. There wasn’t nobody coming by here even before you went and killed everyone. Thanks for that, by the way. No, I mean it. It wasn’t any big loss.”

“I guess no one ever found this place.” The child started to squirm and she gently set him on the ground.

“There was one,” said Luz. “This smiley prick. Called himself Buzzo.”

Buddy looked up sharply but Luz was still stretching, eyes closed, and didn’t notice her. The child crawled on shaking limbs, his knees trailing in the dirt.

“That wasn’t a good day, I tell you,” Luz continued. “Back when we were still raiding often. Everybody in peak condition. I thought we were some tough band of bitches but when we tried to fight him off he wrecked everybody. Jo still blames her bad knee on that asshole. You know him?”

“No,” she lied. “I just heard about him.”

“He had those pills with him. That Joy. Offered us a sample. Ada spat in his face and he just laughed. He gave us a deal. Told us some things and promised to leave us be. In exchange he took one of our own.” She leaned against the wall, carved a trench into the dirt with her heel as though establishing a boundary. “We never did see her again.”

“Who-”

“The dead don’t matter. Pass me a cigarette, would you?”

She scrounged among the cartons until she found one that looked whole and handed it to Luz. She grabbed a lighter out of the dirt and started to flick it. It wouldn’t light and the regular sparks shot up like signals in some ineffable code.

“That was a long time ago,” she said. “Lisa wasn’t even half your height.”

“Did Buzzo see her?”

“No. We had her locked up tight. But after that Ada said she had to learn how to shoot. I taught her. She got good fast. Too fast. It made me nervous. Like some part of her had been waiting for it. You could tell that every time she pulled the trigger she was making something die in her mind. You saw it. She carries that gun wherever she goes.”

“She takes care of it.”

“At least she takes care of something.” The flame finally caught and she lit up and exhaled smoke. “Aside from Buzzo she was the biggest danger in this place. Always raising hell. Smashing glass, stealing food, tipping over the rainbarrels. Got so bad that Ada locked her in the cell for a day.”

“The cell?”

“It’s that cave behind the station. Next to the latrines. You shouldn’t worry about it. You’re not going in there. I’m not sure that it could even hold you.” She rolled the cigarette between her fingers. “After she came out of there Lisa started to leave more and more. And why not? There’s nothing for her here.”

Buddy heard the child grunting beside her and turned. Her eye widened. He was standing up, knees knocking with the effort. He looked bewildered at himself.

 “Well now,” said Luz. “Isn’t that nice.”

The child took two hobbling steps and then fell over. Buddy picked him up and held him to his chest. He was still silent, still with that puzzled expression.

“You take care of him, okay?” Luz said. “You be good to him.”

“I’ll try.”

“Come up here whenever you like.”

“Don’t you have to keep watch?”

She shrugged. “Everything worth seeing now is right here.”

*             *             *

She lay awake listening to the raindrops and eventually rolled aside with a squealing of springs. She gently shook the child awake and picked him up and stepped out. Impossible to tell day or night here but the settlement seemed quieter. No one around except for the shriveled old woman in her chair in front of the station, still rocking, still with that shotgun in her lap. Buddy hadn’t heard anyone mention her name or history. She seemed to be part of the furniture. Difficult to tell if she was even alive.

The women’s latrines consisted of a row of reeking buckets lined up against the wall furthest from the entrance; their contents were routinely carried outside and emptied into the foggy abyss past the edge of the road. Next to them was another cracked cave mouth. Buddy stared at it, then entered, and the dark swallowed her at once.

She hadn’t thought to bring matches. She stepped forward carefully, her free hand feeling out the walls. Before long her toe struck something metal, chiming in the dark. She got down on her knees and felt its shape. Something rounded and rusted. A shackle. She gave it a tug but it would not come loose and after a few more minutes’ feeling around she discovered that there were three more shackles, spaced out approximately where an adult’s limbs would be, all staked into the ground by lengths of thick chain. Rainwater dripped in through unseen seams in the cave ceiling. The metal all gone scaly with rust.

She sat in the middle of those four stakes and looked upwards until her single pupil widened and turned the cave into a soft gray mass seamed with deeper dark. Water dripped down onto her forehead. She contemplated how long Lisa had spent chained in this murk, how her skin might have recoiled with each cold droplet. Shades of Brad’s cellar. Those long days listening to his stupefied snoring, wondering if she could make it out the front door, how far she could get after that.

She sat for some time and turned to leave and behind her was a figure clothed in white that shimmered like a scrap of someone’s ghost. That now-familiar parallel of gleam beside its head. In its other hand it held two clinking bottles clutched between its fingers.

“Hey,” said Lisa. “You fall asleep?”

The dark veiled her face. Buddy had never sensed her presence.

“No. I was just.” Buddy trailed off. “I don’t know what I was doing.”

“Okay.” Lisa held up the bottles. “Thirsty?”

“Not really. But I’ll take one.”

“You still owe me, remember,” she said, and tossed the bottle over. Buddy lost sight of it in the shadows, grabbed out, almost fumbled it, then held it steady. Lisa’s poncho rustled and she struck a match and lit a candle, stuck into the neck of another empty bottle. Buddy winced as the firelight burrowed into her eye. In this new glow she saw that the cell was quite small. She could have touched the ceiling with the flat of her hand.

Lisa sauntered over, leaned against the far wall, opened her beer and drank. Buddy sipped hers, still sitting amongst the chains.

“Where were you?” she asked Lisa.

“Here and there.” She belched. “Getting some sun. Do I need a reason?”

“No. I was just wondering where you were.”

She smirked. “Miss me?”

She didn’t answer that and Lisa’s smirk softened. She slid down the wall and sat, legs splayed.

“Your mutant friends are doing fine,” she said. “Staying put. That horn really works, huh?”

“They were all still there?”

“Christ, you’re asking me?”

“Sorry.”

“That bearded one was still crawling around a little, though. Almost tried to take another bite out of me. Got to be honest, I really want to shoot that guy.”

Her grip on the bottle tightened. “Did you?”

“Nah. Why waste the ammo?” She stroked the rifle’s barrel. “Then again, it’s not like there’s much left to shoot. I’ll get to pull this trigger on this baby eventually.”

“Luz told me you were a good shot.”

“Oh, did she? What else did they tell you?” Buddy stayed silent and Lisa laughed and downed the rest of the bottle and smashed it on the ground. The child cringed at the noise. “It’s okay. It’s all right. Fuck ‘em. Someone ought to. Might help ‘em loosen up a little.” She was starting to slur. She smiled at Buddy as her head lolled and her mouth in the flickering dark looked like a thin red moon, a slit cut open in the night.

“You know,” she said, “I always thought of just walking into some guy’s house and screwing his brains out as he slept. Can you imagine? No one’d ever believe him. He’d probably tell the story over and over again ‘til someone bashed his head in to shut him up. What was it like?”

“What was what like?”

“You know,” said Lisa, and pointed at the child. “You know.”

 Buddy clutched the child closer. Her expression hardened.

“Hey, hey, it’s fine, it doesn’t matter.” Lisa wavered like a flower stalk, embracing the rifle. “I don’t need to know anyway. I got no interest at all. Any time I want a little satisfaction I just put this gun between my legs. A little bolt-action action, ha ha.” Buddy stared. “Sometimes I keep it loaded, just for that extra thrill.” Buddy tensed. “I’m fucking with you.” Buddy relaxed. “Or am I?”

Lisa threw back her head and laughed. She trailed off into hiccupping giggles, one hand over her eyes, the other smacking the riflebutt on the ground as if calling for order.

“Sorry,” she said. “No, really, I’m sorry. It’s just been a while since I met someone who wasn’t sick of my shit by now.” She sniffed and wiped her face. “Hey, be honest. What do you think of this place?”

Buddy took a while to answer. The candle sputtered and spat. Pearly wax dotted the surrounding stone.

“Everyone seems tired,” she said.

“Was it like that in Olathe? Before everyone flipped their shit trying to catch you, I mean.”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t go outside. But sometimes it felt like the people I did know had just given up.” She thought of Brad. “Or were trying really hard not to. Here it’s different. It feels like everyone’s waiting for something.”

“They were waiting for you. And now, here you are.” Lisa’s voice was deadpan. “The Big Girl has cometh.”

“Is that why you brought me here?”

This time it was Lisa’s turn to pause. She sucked at a tooth as if trying to dislodge the answer. When she spoke her voice was quieter than usual.

“You’re someone new,” she said. “That mattered more, to me.”

“Oh.”

“It’s nice talking like this. While it lasts.”

 “Same,” Buddy said, and Lisa perked up. “I mean, in Olathe everyone I met only cared about getting something from me. It’s nice to meet someone who doesn’t really care.”

“Well, fuck you too, bitch,” Lisa said, and Buddy stiffened until she saw that she was smiling again. “You gonna finish that?”

Buddy handed over the bottle and Lisa took a swig and smashed what was left. The beer foamed. She stood, and despite her apparent drunkenness she didn’t appear unsteady on her feet.

“You still owe me one,” she said. “Remember.”

“I remember.”

“I checked in with Ada when I got here. She wants to see you inside the station tomorrow.” She shouldered the rifle. “She’ll probably make you some kind of offer.”

“Are you leaving again?”

“I’ll stick around. For a while. This place just got a little more bearable all of a sudden.”

As she turned to leave Buddy blurted out, “I’m sorry.”

Lisa stopped and turned. She had moved outside the periphery of the candle’s light and her face had been rendered invisible. Buddy was left fumbling for words.

“I heard about what happened,” she finally said. “To your mom. I’m sorry. That you lost her like that.”

“I didn’t lose her.” Lisa’s voice was queerly flat. “I never knew her.”

She left. Buddy felt the child shyly grasping at her breast. He wanted to be fed again. She pushed his head away and stroked his head at his sounds of protest, and soon after the candle was extinguished and the darkness fell like a curtain.

*             *             *

The next day she stood in front of the station.

Like before she remained outside the shelter offered by the ceiling over the pumps, where that wizened sentry rocked and smiled. The rain weighted Buddy’s clothes and darkened her hair but old woman seemed to mark the dry space as her territory and something about her was unsettling. The shotgun was weathered but free of rust, the woman herself so dry that it seemed like she was about to crumble. Her eyes, lost within those nets of wrinkled flesh, looked through Buddy and child both.

At last the door opened and Ada poked her head out.

“The hell are you waiting for?” she called. “Come in.”

Buddy looked one last time at the rocking woman and stepped carefully around her on her way into the station. The woman’s head didn’t turn to follow but she somehow felt like she was being watched anyway.

She hadn’t thought about what she would see inside the station but somehow she was disappointed anyway. The space was larger but still as bare and choked with murk as the rest of the women’s shacks. The linoleum floor was scraped and gouged and she could see deeper streaks of rot where something had been wrenched up from the ground entirely. And now she understood why those sheets of black plastic covered the building’s façade – there had once been windows here, but they had all been smashed, and their jagged remnants glittered like teeth in the light of yet more scattered candles.

Ada was off in a corner, sitting at a small table that was marked and discolored but otherwise seemed far sturdier than most of the furniture Buddy had some across. Near the table was a cot, and a nightstand, and a wicker chair with an unraveling back. This was all that Ada appeared to possess.

“Saw you having a little standoff with Edith out there,” she said. “Don’t mind her. She just likes being in one place.”

“Can she even lift that shotgun?”

“With the best of them. We might be getting on in years but those peckerwoods on the List would have thought twice before tangling with any of the girls here. Pull up that chair and have a seat. Can you leave the boy on the bed?”

“All right.”

“I don’t want him to fall.”

“He’ll behave.”

She set the child on the cot and he sat still and wide-eyed with his palms up like some itinerant asking for alms. She dragged the chair to the table. On the table were two mugs. She could smell the water.

“I wish that I had something a little better to offer.” Ada slid one mug over to Buddy. “Though from what I hear you like this stuff just fine.”  
“There’s no water in Olathe. Nothing you can drink.”

“I know,” she said. “Godforsaken place.”

She laced her thin fingers around her mug as Buddy drank. Her chalk-white hair hung around her face in strings and in this dim light the twisted burnflesh that had eaten her eye seemed to glow with some infected inner radiance. The scars puckered and twisted every time she blinked, muscles trying to work an eyesocket long buried.

Ada said, “You’ve seen how we live, now.”

“A little.”

“Is it any better than out there?”

Buddy took a moment to answer. Diplomacy was unfamiliar territory to her.

“It’s different,” she answered, and Ada smiled a little.

“I appreciate you trying to let me down easy. But I’m no fool. Here or there, it’s all the same place.” She looked down at her water. “It’s Hell, after the fires went out.”

“You’re surviving,” said Buddy. “It’s never easy.”

“Speaking from experience, I’m sure.”

“How did you come here?” she asked. “No one else would say.”

“Past and future,” said Ada quietly. “These are things we try not to talk about. Survival means living only in the moment to make it to the next. Thinking of yesterday will drown you in mourning. Tomorrow will choke you with longing. We think about them. We’re only human. But we do our best not to speak of it.”

Outside, the rain beat against the roof and the thin and shivering plastic.

“Buddy,” Ada said. “Do you believe in God?”

“I don’t think about it,” she replied. “I never had a reason to.”

“I don’t blame you. If you want my opinion, God packed up and fucked off along with every other man in this world worth a damn. But all the women you see here came from the same church group. Getting together every Sunday for service, saying our prayers, shit-talking our husbands. Nothing special, in those days.” Her nails tapped the table. “Then along came this new girl. Out-of-towner. Tiny, nervous thing. She had these big eyes always darting around, like she was watching out for someone. We felt sorry for her so we invited her to our get-togethers. She never talked much but she seemed nice enough. Wouldn’t talk about _her_ husband at all, though. Oh, no. Every time the subject came up she shut up tight as a bear trap.” Ada’s lips thinned. “I’d seen the type before. Thought he might be laying hands on her. But we minded our own business, in those days. Maybe that was a mistake. But it’s something we can’t change now. Something among so many other things.

“One Sunday she didn’t show up to service. We didn’t think much of it at the time but later that night I got a phone call from her. She sounded frantic. Crying. She told me that in two days’ time me and all the women I knew needed to be at the gas station outside of Olathe before midnight. Needed to be. Us and everything we could carry. And before I could ask her what the hell was going on the line went dead and wouldn’t pick up again no matter how many times I dialed. Well, you understand my concern. I thought for sure her husband had finally gone ‘round the bend. She was pregnant at the time, you see. That can make a man lose his mind in all sorts of ways.

“She had kept so much to herself that I didn’t even know where she lived to check up on her. I called up all the girls and passed the word around. We all figured that she was going to cut her old man loose and leave town and this was her roundabout way of asking for a few donations to get her started. We left our own husbands snoring in their beds and came to the station with clothes, food, a few sticks of furniture we could afford to go without. The pimply-faced kid behind the register must have thought we’d lost our damn minds. But we waited there for her, in the parking lot.

“And then,” Ada said, “the sky flashed white.”

At last she picked up the mug and drank deep. She drank until her cheeks bulged out and water dribbled down her chin and onto her lap and then slammed the cup down with a great flat bang like the opening of a gallows door.

She said, “That woman’s name was Nina Yado.”

Buddy’s eye widened.

“Sound familiar, does it?” asked Ada. “Little Nancy?”

“That’s not my name,” Buddy said harshly.

“Around the back from this station are the bathrooms,” she said, ignoring her. “The ladies here have turned it into a sort of shrine. Hanging up little knickknacks and mementos of what they’ve lost. That’s because when the flash faded and the earth rose up and the whole world suddenly turned wrong, I went in there and saw it covered with graffiti. Messages from Nina, telling us what we were in for. ‘This was all I could do.’ ‘There are no more women.’ ‘All you have is each other.’ Apologies. Warnings. And,” she said, “she asked us to take care of you.”

“And you didn’t,” said Buddy.

“Do you blame us?”

“No. You couldn’t even have known.”  
“No. We couldn’t have. We’d learn more as time went on. From our wanderings in Olathe and from a certain visitor who came by some years later. Who Nina’s husband really was and how he wanted to control the world with those evil pills and silly little horn on your hip. Is he dead?”

“Yes.”

“You killed him, I hope.”

“Buzzo killed him,” said Buddy. “Then he died, too.”

Ada’s lip curled. “Good. Good riddance to all of them. The old world’s ended but it still clung on like a damn sickness for so long. You know why all the people here treat me as their leader?” Buddy shook her head. “After I first came back from that bathroom and saw them all standing around staring at the sky, I went up to that pimply-faced kid who’d been behind the register, and…well. Afterwards we tossed what was left of him outside, into the fog. That’s why everyone listens to me. Because I did what had to be done.”

She pushed her mug aside and leaned over with her hands clasped together as in if prayer and Buddy saw all of Ada’s limbs shook, thin halos of vibration all round her skin. If she relaxed for even a moment then all her joints may well have come undone at once and she would collapse to the floor like a heap of loose crockery.

“There’s still something I have to do,” she said. “What your mother started, I must finish. I need to take care of us. Of you.”

“I don’t need anyone to take care of me.”

“It’s plain to see that you’re stronger than anyone else alive, that’s for certain. But there are still things we can give that Olathe can’t.” Buddy’s eye flicked down to the full glass of water before her. “Not just supplies. Somewhere you’d be accepted. A place to rest.” She snorted. “And I hear you’ve been getting along with Lisa too, though God only knows how or why.”

“I’d heard of her,” said Buddy, and Ada’s eyebrow rose. “Or I heard the name, at least.”

“Well, it wasn’t an uncommon name,” Ada replied. “I’m sure there were Lisas everywhere, once. But the one we have here is a handful. I can’t begin to tell you how badly that girl needs a friend.”

Lisa’s mother, that faceless nameless woman, screaming into the sky as her torso was sawn open to liberate the squalling child. Ada so desperate to liberate that baby that she’d killed one of her own. For what reason. Buddy felt the answer there, on the edges of her mind, but it skittered away before she could think of it more clearly. Something obvious. Something foreboding.

“I need to ask something of you in return,” said Ada. “Two things, actually. Do this for me and you’ll have a place with us wherever we go, and if I have anything to say about it we won’t be spending the rest of our lives in this drippy shithole. Will you help us?”

Buddy drank deep of her mug, set it down. “Tell me.”

“The first will be the hardest. You might have objections. So I’ll get it out of the way now.”

For an instant, Ada’s eye flickered to something behind Buddy. And Buddy felt herself pinned between that monocular gaze and that of the child, sitting on the cot like a penitent, and she realized all at once what Ada was about to ask and felt all her muscles spasm. For an instant she wanted to reach out and crush that thin neck and the words it held before they were birthed into the world. But it was too late.

Ada said, “We need your son.”  


	5. The Song

Endless silence. The rain drummed on the plastic outside like a worried visitor. Buddy sat frozen with her hands curled around her mug, both her and Ada unblinking. From the shadows in the corner the child regarded this tableau, his legs curled like someone in meditation.

At last Ada said, “Sweetie, if you don’t calm down you’re going to get a hand full of glass.”

Buddy looked down at the mug in her hands. The surface was spiderwebbed with cracks, water trickling into the webs of her fingers. She relaxed her grip.

“I’m leaving,” Buddy said.

“Maybe I ought to explain.”

“You’ve said enough.”

“I didn’t mean that-”

“My whole life,” Buddy went on, and somehow her voice remained measured and calm even though she felt a terrible throbbing heat in her chest and the socket of her ruined eye. “For as long as I could remember I had people trying to use me. Either they wanted to rape me or they wanted to lock me away so no one else could. Every day, with that hanging over my head. Can you imagine that?”

“I’ve seen my share of-”

“No. You can’t imagine that.”

Ada’s mouth thinned but she did not reply. Between Buddy’s hands a puddle of water grew.

“You don’t understand why I did what I did,” Buddy said. “All those people I killed. I was angry, yes. I wasn’t in my right mind. But it was the only way I could think of to find relief. I felt like…I don’t know. An intruder. Like the whole world was somewhere I wasn’t meant to be. I couldn’t speak to anyone. I couldn’t be with anyone. Nearly every man I met came at me with the same look in their eyes. I just wanted somewhere to stand without being looked at like that. Where I could breathe. Walk this way or that way without wondering who would try to grab hold of me next. Just for that, I killed all those people. And I’ll never forget that I did it. I’ll never forget.” She breathed deep, and exhaled. “And now. That’s what you want to do to him.”

“It’s for the future,” Ada said quietly.

“Fuck the future.”

“Then why did you keep him? Why did you carry him all this way? Pardon me for being direct, Buddy, but I don’t think it was out of love. You never even gave the poor thing a name.”

“Watch it, or I’ll-”

“You’ll kill me? Then kill me. I’m old and tired and this one eye of mine goes a little more to shit every day. But,” she said, “I’m still around. For the same reason your boy is still around. Because, somewhere down in our foolish little hearts, we still think there’s hope. A moment where we can reach out and grab hold of a better tomorrow.”

The handle fell off Buddy’s splintered mug. The inside had run dry. Its contents dripped on her lap.

“This is that moment,” Ada said. “This is that hope.”

Buddy’s mouth opened, then closed. Instead she turned in her seat and watched the child. He seemed to rouse when she met his eyes.

“Whatever happened to you in Olathe was unforgivable,” Ada said. “We saw enough of the brutality there. I don’t shed a single tear for anyone whose blood you spilled. But we’re not like them, fighting and fucking whatever we see just because we’ve got nothing better to do. Many of these people were mothers themselves. He’ll be treated well.”

“Until he grows up,” she said dully.

Ada sighed. “Do you think we’ll tie him to a pole and ride a wrinkly little train on him every night?”

She spun back around, eye burning. “Don’t you dare-”

“It’s a vulgar subject, so I’m being vulgar. Don’t get me wrong, there are ladies here who’d dry-hump a broomstick down to sawdust if they got the chance, but between you and me, Buddy, it’s likely nothing compared to how that boy will feel when he comes of age. Once he learns how to swing that little club around he’ll want to use it. And who’s going to satisfy him then? You?” Buddy blanched. “Speaking as an old woman to a younger one, this business is all fun and games for the men. It’s us who need to handle the nasty part. Giving birth is no bed of roses. As you’ve learned. But we’ll happily shoulder that burden, for as long as our bodies last. We just need another generation. Enough people to lay the foundations for something better.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean, exactly?” Buddy asked. “A world with you in charge?”

“Ha. Funny. I won’t be around long enough for that. Every time I wake up in the morning it feels like a tiny miracle. Or a tiny curse, I suppose,” she added wistfully. “The way my back aches…anyway. There should be enough of us left to pass on new lessons. To your child, and to his children. How to run a proper society. No more of the tedious dick-waving that led us to this point. No more trading women around like livestock or bashing each other’s heads in because it’s a slow afternoon. Frankly, I can’t be sure it’ll work. I’m no historian but people do seem to keep running into the same predicaments over and over, even now. It’s as if they-”

“They can’t help themselves,” Buddy said quietly.

“Yes,” Ada said. “Exactly that.”

She shook her head and rubbed her scarred face with the flat of her hand. She seemed to be growing smaller. As though the effort of all this speech was causing her aged frame to collapse.

“Nothing is unendurable,” she whispered. “One day even this will pass, I’m sure of it. The frozen sky, the fog around this place, everything wrong with Olathe…the world will shake off all of it like a bad cold. But that restoration won’t mean anything if we’re not around to see it. We need you for that, Buddy. I want you to be a part of it.”

Buddy clutched at the folds of her poncho. Water wrung out, ran between her fingers.

“And if I say no?” she asked.

“We can’t force you to do anything,” Ada answered. “You’ve proven that you’re too strong for that. I imagine we’ll have to go out to Olathe ourselves in search of men.”

“You should have done that a long time ago.”

“We were cowards. We couldn’t risk being seen. To say nothing of the Joy. What if someone tried to have a child of one of those addicts and it mutated in the womb? Ate the mother from the inside out? Christ, the thought alone scared most of us too much to go through with the idea.”

Like what happened to Lisa’s mother, Buddy thought. But she held her tongue.

“But as for you,” Ada continued. “If you deny this request then you won’t be welcome here anymore. We can’t make you leave. But I can guarantee that as long as you remain here you’ll feel like…how did you put it? An intruder.”

There was a creak behind Buddy. She turned around again and saw the child on his side, one thumb stuck in his mouth. His eyes were half-lidded but still fluttered like he was fighting to keep them open. Not wanting to take his gaze off her.

“You said there were two conditions,” Buddy said, still watching the child.

“Yes. The mutants.”

“What about them?”

“I want them dead,” Ada said simply. “I don’t particularly care how. But those monstrosities have no place in any future worth living in. Lisa tells me you’ve gathered them all up into a little herd, so you’re halfway there already.”

Buddy rose and walked over to the bed and picked up the child. He clutched at her wet clothes and in seconds his breathing turned heavy and slow. He’d allowed himself to fall asleep.

“Why did you shepherd them around like that, anyway?” Ada asked. “Building yourself an army?”

“No.” She tucked the child under her arm. “It’s none of your business.”

“Will you do what we asked?”

Buddy didn’t answer.

“I think you’re a decisive girl, but I’ll give you the chance to sleep on it,” said Ada. “But tomorrow I want your answer. One way or another.”

Buddy’s eye twitched and she stepped up to the table and buried Ada in her shadow. The old woman met her gaze unflinchingly. Those mismatched stares, both half-blind.

Buddy turned, ready to leave without another word, but then Ada lurched forward and grabbed at her wrist and Buddy nearly flung her across the room in shock. The woman’s arthritic grip made her skin crawl, fingers smooth and dry and sharp like the bones of strange fish dredged from the desertified bed of some long-dead sea.

“Let me go,” Buddy said. Her voice harsh but low, so as not to wake the child. Ada wouldn’t release her. Instead she clawed further up her arm like someone drowning and the desperation in her face made Buddy recoil. Her teeth were clenched and many were missing and she could see through the gaps into the darkness beneath.

“This can’t be the end of us,” Ada hissed. “We need to survive this. We need to come out of it better than we were. It has to mean something. It has to be worth something.”

Buddy shook off the arm and fled. The last she saw of the old woman was her sitting alone at the table, hands still clutching feebly at nothing.

The cold air outside hit her like a wet rag and as her eye adjusted to the light she saw the women gathered around the station. Not all of them. Half a dozen maybe, including Edith, who rocked in her rocker with her back turned as ever. The others all watching her, expressions inscrutable. Their heads silently turned to follow her as she held the child close and went back to her shack, head down, cheeks burning. She thought, If I had my hands free I would kill you all right now.

She returned to her shack like a fugitive, standing there in the musty dark with eye shut tight, breathing deep with the child to her chest. It wasn’t until she opened her eye again that she noticed the deeper patch of clotted shadow on her bed, flanked by that thin stripe of glimmer.

“Hey,” said Lisa. “Didn’t go well?”

Buddy didn’t answer. The mattress rustled.

“You want me to leave?” Lisa asked.

She saw no other gleam and smelled no liquor. For once, Lisa had arrived without a drink.

“No,” said Buddy. “It’s fine.”

“Hold on, I’ll give us a light. Thought you might flip your shit a little if you came in here and saw the place lit up already.”

She sat opposite the bed as Lisa lit a candle and leaned back. Her face was solemn in the flame. It was an expression that looked alien on her. Something parasitic settled atop her skin.

“What did you think of the offer?” she asked.

“You knew?”

“Christ, didn’t you? Everyone here was side-eyeing that kid from the minute you showed up.”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I should have.”

“Doesn’t sound like you’re crazy about the idea.”

“I’m not. I don’t know why. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know very much, do you?”

She didn’t even try to retort this time. She huddled into herself. The child’s blood pulsed beneath her fingertips. Nameless voiceless flesh brought into the world with purpose unknown.

“Look, it’s like you said before,” Lisa told her. “I don’t really give a shit either way. If you want to talk, then talk. I won’t spread it around.”

“Really?”

“I didn’t tell anyone about your little Joy stash, did I? I’m assuming you’ve still got those on you.”

Buddy reflexively put a hand to her breast, felt the pouch’s weight.

“Everyone told me I was going to save the world,” she said. “I never believed that any of them meant it. It was just an excuse. But I think this is for real. Ada’s serious.”

“Ada’s always serious.”

“But what next? When I was carving my way through Olathe I never thought what would happen next. I’m not even sure I really expected to win. But I did. I lived. And a little while after, I had him.” She stroked the child’s cheek. “I think that’s why I kept him around. At least while I was responsible for him I had something to do.” She paused. “I think if I hadn’t found this place I would have tried to keep him all to myself. Just so that I could feel like my life had meaning.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“No. It doesn’t.” That musty smell, that cellar dark. “It’s the worst thing you can ever do.”

“So then get rid of the kid. Who cares what they do to him, anyway? Out there he’d have just starved to death.”

“He’s all that’s left of me. Just like the mutants are all that’s left of us. The old world. Our old lives. If I lose them, what’s next?” Her stare was haunted. “You remember how I said I wanted freedom? I think that now I have too much of it. I feel like I’m about to step right out of this world. Because if I do what Ada wants, it won’t need me anymore.”

Lisa ruminated on this, tapping one fingernail on her rifle barrel. Then she said, “I think you’re worrying about it too much.”

“Really.”

“Really, really.” The mattress springs moaned as she leaned forward. “Who gives a shit what the world needs you for? Especially this part of it. You’re the Big Girl. People are always going to try and use you for something.” She pointed at Buddy. “You should just live life for you.”

Buddy’s face was frozen. After several seconds, Lisa lowered her finger.

“You all right?”

“Yeah,” she croaked. “That just. Reminds me of something my dad said.”

“You mean that Yado creep?”

“No. He might be my father but he didn’t raise me. It was someone else.”

“Who?”

“Nobody,” Buddy said. “He was nobody. He was a fuckup and a failure and every time he tried to help me he just hurt me worse and even then he was always too late and I’m glad he’s dead, I’m fucking glad, if I’d gotten the chance I would have killed him myself.” By the end of this she was nearly shouting and she had bent low over the child with his body cupped in her arms as though she were about to hand him to an altar, and her breathing was heavy and ragged.

“Yikes,” Lisa said dryly. “Tell me what you really think.”

“I hated him.”

“Sure sounds like it.”

“I still hate him.”

“Right on, sister.”

She raised her head. “Do you think this is funny?”

Her voice had suddenly turned quiet and full of ice and even Lisa was momentarily given pause.

“No,” she said. “None of this is funny. That’s why you should laugh.”

Buddy stared uncomprehending. Lisa’s face was solemn and she grasped the rifle in both hands so that the weapon divided her face diagonal. That unmarked face. Those intact and half-lidded eyes. Child of ruin, young and yet verging on some age that had never been.

“It’s been like this for as long as I can remember,” she said. “Everyone miserable and miserable to be around. They always act like they’re in mourning. They’re always thinking of the world they lost.” Her teeth flashed. “The world that me and you never got to see. But that means we’re better off, get it? We don’t need to be so depressed over everything. We never knew the world that was lost and what you never knew you can’t lose. We’re not chained down to any sort of past. We’re floating free.”

She rested her head against the gunbarrel and her lips peeled back in grimace or grin; it was hard to be sure which.

“Ada hates me for that. Oh, does she ever. I think she hates me for it even more than she hates me for being born without a dick. Don’t think I can’t put two and two together. I was supposed to be the first candidate for her big repopulation plan.” She pointed at Buddy. “Now that she’s got a chance of bringing that world back there’s nothing that’ll stop her. She’ll hunt you clear to the other end of Olathe to pry that kid away if you don’t give him up.”

“She said that she wouldn’t.”

“She lied. You told me you’ve been chased around all your life by people who thought they could save the world if they just got their hot little hands on you. What makes Ada any different? But even if she did get ahold of that kid and take out all the mutants too, it still wouldn’t change the truth.”

“And what’s that?”

“That what they want can’t be recovered,” Lisa said. “Can’t be mended. Can’t be put right again. If that’s what these people have been living for then they’ve been living for nothing. The past is empty. The future is broken. All that matters is today.”

Her voice was low and crisp and without a hint of slur. Buddy’s shoulder blades dug into the shack’s wall as she held the child tighter. If these were the thoughts which frothed in Lisa’s mind then it was maybe no small wonder why she often kept them drowned with drink.

“So don’t let it get to you,” Lisa went on. “Whatever happens to the kid, the mutants, your deadbeat dad, you’ll keep going. Someday there’ll come a time when you’ve lost everything you knew. And when that happens, laugh. Because if you can laugh at that, you can laugh at anything.”

“And what about you?” Buddy said. “Has that time come?”

“It came as soon as I was born,” Lisa said. “But who knows? You can always sink a little lower. Maybe someday I’ll get a chance to take my own advice.”

Rain pattered against the front flap. If anyone outside was eavesdropping then they were being exceptionally stealthy about it. Still, Buddy hunched over, and spoke quietly.

“What should I do?”

“You tell me.”

She looked down at the child. “I can’t take care of him by myself anymore. Ada was right about that. But if what you’re saying is true, then she’ll just come after me after I hand him over.”

“She might. Want me to back you up?”

“Why would you do that? I barely know you.”

“No one knows anyone,” Lisa singsonged. “For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure that I literally like you better than anyone else in the world right now.”

“Yeah.” She was grateful for the dim light as her cheeks grew hot. “Same, I guess.”

“Tell you what. Get rid of the mutants, at least, they’re no big loss either way. Then come back here and we’ll figure out what to do next.” She leaned back and tapped her rifle meaningfully. “She’s not going to try and kill you as soon as you walk through the front gate. Hell, she’ll probably throw a party, if she remembers how.”

Buddy nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. The mutants…a lot of them ended up like that because I didn’t leave them any other choice. And there’s no taking back what happened to them. Once you end up like that, I don’t think you can even die without help.” She clenched her fist. “I need to finish it.”

“And you need to finish things here. Hold onto your Joy. I know that shit’s bad news but you might need to pop a few if you’re going to declare war on this place. Some of these bitches really are tough.”

“I don’t want them dead,” Buddy said, and for a moment, Lisa’s eyes narrowed. “Even if you’re right, and Ada does want me out of the picture, someone still needs to take care of him. And I don’t think it can be me. Not anymore. I never…I don’t know how to be a parent. But I’m good at fighting. And I can definitely show them that trying to kill me is more trouble than it’s worth.”  She reached up and touched her bandaged eye. “They can have what’s left of this world. I’ll go out and make my own. And I’ll always be watching. To make sure they don’t repeat the same mistakes.”

“If I know anything about Ada, she won’t be easy to convince.”

“You don’t know how strong I am.”

Lisa grinned and stood, the gun propped on her shoulder. She loomed over Buddy like a thin splinter in the shadows themselves, night opening up into darker night, with only the shine of her teeth and her weapon to break apart the black.

“No,” she said. “But I’d really like to find out.”

And with that, she was gone.

*             *             *

Buddy didn’t try to sleep.

Her head was full of noise. The buzz and gnash of thought. She was hounded by quandaries for which she had no name. No language with which to combat them. Brad had taught her how to kill but not how to question.

Had she found the language she would have thought that her brief sojourn across the ruined land had shown her faint and fleeting symptoms of what seemed a larger disease. A malady that had gone on long before her birth and had no reason not to persist if civilization somehow continued. Monstrous repetition. Bad habits without end. People fighting and fucking without reason or care for the consequences, first out of ignorance, then out of deliberate malice, as though daring the future to come and exact its toll upon them. And the price had come, in the form of Buddy herself. The Big Girl’s march had been started by the careless violence in which she had been immersed, in the animal greed with which she’d been pursued. By abusing her, trapping her, relentlessly grasping for her skin, the men of Olathe had invited their own final destruction.

But now Buddy too felt trapped in this wheel. Her violence had ended and she’d been left without a new course to take. Since she’d abandoned her blade she’d traipsed through the desolation she’d left behind and found no way to bring life back to the earth. The child had seemed to her less of a living thing and more of a talisman. An artifact that, if brought to the proper altar and offered with the proper ritual, would burst into light and wash over the land and cleanse it of drought and blood forever. Now that time had come, and she still felt herself hesitant to release him. Thoughtlessly. Selfishly. Dig a cellar and bury him within and whisper to him every night to stay, keep her in his sights, because she only existed with purpose as long as he lived.

That was the wheel. And despite her lofty words to Lisa she felt that all intentions and actions were contained within this wheel and it would turn until it finally ground all of them into mulch. Until it left their bones to bake in the dirt.

These would be her words if she could find them. Instead they remained formless and coagulated into a pulsing dread that sat in her like a tumor.

Eventually she rose and went to the child in his makeshift crib. He slept, drool running down one cheek. Occasionally his leg would kick. As if, in his dream, he were trying to stand and run.

Buddy gathered him in her arms and stepped outside. The settlement was silent; she couldn’t tell day from night but it appeared that the women had all gone to their own beds as well. All except for Edith, who rocked and smiled in front of the gas station with her head bowed. Buddy approached her from the side and thought she’d gone unnoticed but then the chair abruptly stopped and Edith’s head twitched toward her, ever so slightly. Buddy froze in place and after a moment Edith relaxed again and continued to rock. In that moment she had moved with reptile speed.

Buddy didn’t try to cross her. Instead she walked around to the back of the station, where two more doorways stood open. In one entryway stood a bottled candle and a beaten lighter. Buddy bent low (the child started to fuss, the rain having poked him awake), lit the flame, picked up the bottle and stepped inside.

The women’s bathroom was even colder than the rest of the settlement, the linoleum trapping the air’s damp chill. Sinks gone, toilets gone, mirrors cracked, stalls ripped apart. On the walls of this room the women had found the graffiti left by Nina Yado. Those oracular scrawlings that had allowed them to survive in the new Olathe’s first, chaotic days. Those writings had long gone. Time had worn them down to a few stray specks in the white, like the night sky in photo-negative.

As Ada had said, the room was stuffed with bric-a-brac. The walls were papered with photographs, surfaces turned bubbly and glitched by moisture. The pipes that had once borne up the toilets were stuffed with bouquets of dried flowers which had long lost their scent. Buddy had to watch her step to avoid kicking up small carved and sculpted figurines of creatures she could not recognize, and the ceiling was festooned with twisted creations of wire and thread, frozen birds with crafted outstretched wings that clinked softly in her passing. A jewel-inlaid box no larger than Buddy’s palm. A child’s dress gone to mold. A dish. A comb. A coin.

All these things lost and never to be recovered.

Buddy panned the walls with her candlelight and then stopped. One photograph at the far end of the room had been pasted apart from the others, a ring of empty linoleum separating it from the warped and muddied scenes in all the other pictures. It depicted a woman, alone on a patch of grass, her eyes pained with the effort of smiling. Her frame was small and spare but her belly was swollen and in her features Buddy saw an echo of her own face.

“Ah. Ah.”

She looked down at the child. He grasped her poncho and tugged. There was almost a sort of urgency in those dark eyes. Even after all this time she still could not put a name to him. When she saw him now, with his black hair and overhanging brow and perpetually grave expression, all she could think of was Brad.

“Ah,” he said. “Ah ma. Mama. Mama ma.”

Those words first spoken on that dry and blasted lake. She looked back at the photo, at Nina Yado’s pregnant form, and thought of Lisa’s own faceless nameless mother, slit end to end to retrieve the child within. Thrashing around in her own blood. The women seemed haunted by the memory. It wouldn’t leave them no matter how they tried.

She came to a decision.

“All right,” she said, bent down to the child, and kissed him. “All right.”

*             *             *

The next day.

Again she waited in front of the station, out in the rain. This time she felt all the women’s stares on her, from their eaves and doorways. She wondered how many of them might be grasping weapons in case this meeting didn’t go to plan. Edith was there out front, a desiccated and well-armed gargoyle on the building’s façade.

The door creaked open. Ada limped out.

“I’ve told you before not to stand in the rain,” she said. Buddy remained where she was.

Ada hobbled over to her. Their eyes locked. Despite the damp air, the atmosphere felt explosive.

“Well?” she asked.

“I’ll do it.”

For a moment Ada did nothing. Then she lunged forward and flung her arms around Buddy and it took a tremendous act of will for Buddy not to break her in half out of sheer reflex. The hug went on for far too long and her skin still writhed in revulsion at the old woman’s touch. The women were unmoving but, in that instant of tension, Edith’s thumb darted to her shotgun’s hammer. Then Ada let go, and stepped back, and both Buddy and Edith relaxed.

“I apologize if that was awkward,” Ada said hoarsely.

“It’s fine.”

“I honestly wasn’t certain what you’d say.” She put her hands over her face, voice trembling. “It’s just…all this time…”

Then she sniffed sharply and lowered her hands again. Her eyes were bloodshot but clear.

“Right. That’s enough of being sentimental. I imagine you’ll want to head out today. Let me send a few of my stronger girls with you, I imagine taking care of those mutants will get a bit tiring-”

“I can do it alone,” Buddy said. She patted the trumpet. “With this.”

Ada’s mouth thinned.

“Ah. Yes. Should’ve remembered that. You have a plan?”

“I do.”

“Then leave the boy with us, at least. No reason for him to get burned to a crisp in that desert again.”

“I’m taking him with me,” Buddy said. “It’s important. He needs to see.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“That’s fine. You can have him when I’m done. But this last thing is just for the two of us. Don’t send anyone else. Don’t let anyone else leave here until I’m back. This moment,” Buddy said, with finality, “is ours.”

Silence rolled out. Ada’s face was very still. When she spoke she sounded calm, if a bit exasperated.

“’I don’t think I’ll ever understand young people,” she sighed. “How long will you be gone?”

“A day. Maybe two.”

“Stay put, then. I’ve got some supplies you can take along. I’ll pack in some of Becky’s preserves, too, for the baby. They should last you.” She turned back to the station. “Until you return to us.”

Then Buddy was walking out of the commune with a weighty satchel over her shoulder. She felt the stares of all the women on her back and for a moment she turned to look the way she’d come and she saw them assembled there like thin pillars hammered into the mud, monuments without reason or purpose. On the far end of the settlement, perched atop its highest tier, was a thin white streak. Lisa, watching her go. Her face eaten up by fog.

Buddy left them all.

*             *             *

She made her way down the broken street, careful not to stray from its center. The fog drained away and the ground underfoot started to crunch as asphalt gave way to baked dirt. She emerged blinking in the sun and shielded the child’s eyes from the light, and then she nearly ran face-first into Brad.

Buddy cried aloud and took a hasty step back. The child made a sort of clucking sound deep in his throat and looked here and there, alarmed by her alarm. Brad remained unmoving. His bloated frame had been burnt and blackened by the relentless sun and sand marbled his beard. Buddy stepped cautiously around him and looked at the desert where he’d come. A deep trench had been carved into the dirt by his passing.

“How did you even get here?” she asked, after her heartbeat slowed. Brad, as ever, did not answer.

Slowly, with one hand on the trumpet, Buddy crouched low and searched for the eyes beneath that hanging caveman brow. Searched for some glimmer of intelligence, the man he’d once been. But all she saw was shadow and she was reluctant to get any closer. She remembered what happened to Jack.

Instead she rose and said, “You’re lucky you didn’t get any further. They would have killed you on sight.”

Brad appeared unconcerned.

She walked past him and raised the trumpet to command him to follow, but before she could play she heard a great dragging heave behind her. Brad had already turned and started to move.

She didn’t need to watch the clouds this time. The trail Brad had left clearly marked the way through the twisting sands. She kept her head down, not heeding the mirages. Sweat pricked the back of her neck. After those days spent in the women’s misty settlement, the air here burned Buddy’s throat and the heat was like an act of violence.

But it wasn’t long before the sun abated somewhat and she looked up and saw the crazework silhouette of the congregated mutants. Their tangled knots of skin were crisped and flaking, their eyes shriveled and bleached. Many of their mouths were agape and their tongues had dried gray laced with crimson where the meat had split and bled free. They seemed heedless to all of it but in some of their blank gazes Buddy imagined something accusatory.

She blew her horn and they shuddered back into life, their flesh cracking further with the movement. They shambled after her as she walked into the desert.

It wasn’t far from here. That dust-choked town, those splintered planks. The weathered clapboard over the bar, its shadow hanging over Roddy Derrnger’s remains like a poised guillotine. The man’s blood had dried to flakes of rust and Buddy didn’t spare it a second glance as she and the mutants passed it and halted on the banks of the empty lake. The land here was unchanged. The blazing skies hung overhead the same as ever. Buddy could still see the divots in the dirt where she and Lisa had stood not a week before.

She regarded the huddled mutants. Most of them had stopped but Brad kept pushing forward until he hunched before her at the head of the crowd. Buddy looked at him. She looked at the hole. Then she bit her lip until it bled and cursed beneath her breath. She set down the child and the trumpet and ripped a strip of fabric from the bottom of her poncho and then pulled the strip in two. She kneaded the fabric in her fingers, approached Brad slowly, and then darted forward and shoved it into both his ears.

Brad didn’t react. Not to her approach nor to the makeshift earplugs. Buddy stood before him, fists shaking. She wanted to embrace him until his skull shattered under her grip.

“I can kill you any time I want,” she said. “But not now.”

She regarded the other mutants. Their yawning, spitless mouths, their strawlike clumps of hair. And for the last time she thought, Maybe this is love.

She turned and picked up the trumpet and blasted out a quick series of notes, swinging the instrument towards the lake bed. The mutants heard her command and started to move. They shambled to the edge of the lake and then tumbled down and over, the curdled cream of their flesh sucking and slapping nauseatingly against itself as their twisted limbs failed them. Still they continued into the hole, flowing and crawling over each other, until the bottom of the lake was mobbed with these mad agglomerates of skin and hair and broken, smiling teeth. The wind blew like an overture.

Buddy held up the trumpet. She tested the valves. They crunched a bit with sand but seemed functional enough. She looked to her left and Brad was there. She looked to her right and the child was there. She bent down and gently gripped the top of his head and turned it to the hole.

“Watch,” she said to him. “Remember.”

Then she took a deep breath, raised the trumpet, and began to play.

Even after all this time she wasn’t much of a musician. Her first notes were feeble, hesitant, as she tried to get her fingers untangled and understand how the sounds linked to one another. But then her breathing steadied and the trumpet’s song echoed across what was left of Olathe, mournful and low, eight notes and ten, swinging back and forth like a body hanging from a gallows, and as she played the mutants once again stirred to life and eyed each other as if noticing their ruined frames for the first time, and they grinned and gaped and bit down hard.

Buddy kept her eye upward on the bloody sky and played even as the tearing and gnashing beneath her grew louder and the air smelled acrid like old iron. She played even as her hands started to shake and her eyes began to water. She felt her chest shudder as though her ribcage could no longer bear the weight of the body around it and would soon collapse and crush the heart within, and she sobbed into her song and kept playing even though she knew why she felt like this, because this was the end of it, all of the labor and grief and cheap thrills that had existed before the end of the world and had persisted in their crippled way even after it, before she had come along and broken Olathe for good. Her song was the funeral hymn for the world that was and she played it to the end, until the soft purr and spurt and chewing sounds beneath her feet finally came to a halt.

She gasped like she’d just come up from deep water and dropped the trumpet and fell to her knees. Her nose dripped and her eyes burned; even the empty socket cried, darkening the bandage that protected it. Then she wiped her face, and got back to her feet, and looked out over the lake.

The mutants had so much blood and even then the lake was only about half full. Their torn and exsanguinated remains turned into a red-black slurry dusted with foam. Gobbets of half-chewed flesh bobbed along its surface like grotesque buoys. The stench was overpowering. Acrid and somehow sweet. It coated the inside of her mouth like felt.

In time, she thought, the women would leave that rainy village. Armed with her child and whatever children he produced, they would set out to reclaim this land as their own. But in this place would be the stain of the world that had been left behind, repulsive and stinking and still somehow beautiful. Though they would give it a wide berth and never approach it for the stench, and maybe never even speak of it aloud except in rumor and implication, this memorial would remain. A sign that, at some point, no matter how disastrous it had ended, some other life had been here.

The child had stood up again, knees knocking a bit from the effort. He turned and smiled wide at Buddy. His cheeks dimpled. He seemed thrilled by the sight. Buddy smiled back.

What happened next she couldn’t quite understand.

The air cracked. As though someone had gathered up the sky and broken it over their knee. The child jumped and did a little half-pirouette and then fell over with a large red hole in his side and he lay there in a spray of his candycolored entrails, smile gone, eyes pinned wide. His mouth opened and closed and his brow wrinkled like he pondering some deep question, like he was as puzzled by this occurrence as Buddy herself. He made a soft gurgle in the back of his throat and in gaping mouth Buddy could see the small white stubs of his new teeth. He was covered in blood and there was blood in his hair and as Buddy watched the child blinked and he blinked again and then he died.

As Buddy turned around she felt at once stiff and weightless. Tethered to the ground by cords about to snap any minute. Everything around her had gone abstract, just shapes that she saw and recognized but couldn’t fit together in her head. In the distance was the shape of Roddy Derringer’s bar and kneeling before it was the shape of Lisa with the shape of her gun raised, and Buddy remained uncomprehending in place even as Lisa drew back the rifle’s bolt with a crisp clack-clack and fired again.

A great weight settled on Buddy’s chest and she sat down hard. The sky and land switched places before her and she stared up at that sweltering red sunset, and she smelled blood and there was blood in the back of her throat, and no matter how she tried to breathe she couldn’t get enough air. The shadow of Lisa fell over her and the empty black eye of her gunbarrel loomed, and then that hole grew and grew until it swallowed everything Buddy had ever known.


	6. The Rest

She awoke to hard earth beneath her cheek. The grit rasping her raw. She lay flat but still the ground moved beneath her. As though the world itself were trying to scrape itself free of her carcass.

After a moment she understood that she wasn’t dead. The hole in her chest pulsed in her like a second heartbeat. From this wound emerged tendrils of something she could not even recognize as pain, just ceaseless and poisonous heat. Her tongue was a cracked twist of leather. Her hair was dripping with perspiration. Were she able to turn around she might have seen the slug trail of sweat that she was leaving behind.

But instead her overheated eye darted around until it found a wall of charred flesh undulating beside her. Then she realized that she was being dragged along by her poncho. Brad. Brad here, by her side, retrieving her from the grave of the other mutants.

Let me go, she wanted to say. But she couldn’t work up the air. She thought of the child lying there in the splashed tattoo of his insides. He had died but he might not be dead. Stranger things had happened. Let me go, she tried to say again. We can’t leave him there all alone.

But Brad didn’t heed her, and that sick heat bore her down to darkness once again.

*             *             *

When she re-opened her eye the ground was even harsher than before. The sand cut at her face like glass. She clenched her teeth weakly punched at that wall of meat until at last Brad released her to lay gasping and twitching on her side.

Her poncho was tacky with blood and when she tried to rise her legs buckled alarmingly and sent her back to her knees. She coughed and blood flecked the ground. It seemed to suffuse her; she could smell its iron tang every time she inhaled.

She raised her head and looked around at the desert. The air wavered and warped. This was the no-man’s-land that hid the women’s settlement. Behind her was the trail that Brad’s bulk had carved into the ground. And in front of her was a trail of blood, great droplets that ran on and on like a profound ellipsis. Brad’s head, too, was bloody. His beard was claggy with gore.

“So you got her,” she croaked. “Good.”

She took several deep breaths and forced herself to stand. Her wound flared like a curse and its heat nearly knocked the wind out of her but she balled her fists and stayed on her feet. She turned and looked down the trail that Brad had left behind. They couldn’t have traveled far. She thought that if she kept a steady pace then she could go back and retrieve the child, and have Brad ferry them both to shelter before she bled out. The trumpet was still there, too. She could use it to give him a little added motivation, if necessary.

She took two steps and collapsed into the dirt.

After a moment she began to weep.

The sunlight lay on her back like molten paint and her head held in her cupped arms and she had been bled and burnt so dry that not even tears would come as she shook and sobbed. Her cries were soft and low but if she could have found the breath she would have turned on her back and screamed into the sky, until her throat ruptured and her wound tore and the last of her dripped out to be swallowed by the thirsting earth, because there was no longer anyone to hear it anywhere. Brad was deafened and dumb and her child was dead. Dusty was dead like her child was dead. Her child was dead and everyone was dead and Olathe had gone empty once and forever and she was alone.

She raised herself on her elbows and in the twisting horizon she saw a figure. Black-robed and red-masked. The mirage warped and with its wavering outline it looked like it was extending a hand. Inviting her to somewhere unknown and untouchable.

Buddy’s lip trembled. Then she turned away, and staggered back to Brad, and hauled herself onto his stinking corpulence. She weakly struck his back and he once again began to crawl forward, to where the women dwelled.

She went limp again, nauseated by the undulation of flesh beneath her. Out the corner of her eye she could see more hallucinatory outlines and without turning she knew that they were all over, she was mobbed by ghosts, her victims standing in judgement, saying nothing, going nowhere, but instead she buried her face in her arms again. There was another ghost waiting. That laughing phantom in the filth-encrusted white shawl. When Lisa had stood over Buddy’s body and prepared to finish her off there had been almost nothing at all in her face, just a faint and fleeting curiosity. Another bottle she had thrown, waiting to hear the smash.

You bitch, Buddy thought. You worthless bitch, you have to die.

And as she lost consciousness again, she wasn’t certain who she meant.

*             *             *

She awoke again to the sound of rain.

Buddy lay on the cot in Ada’s gas station, the room unlit and thick with darkness. The cold air bit at her bare skin; her poncho was gone. She attempted to rise and find it but this least movement seemed to be too much at the moment. Her muscles all went stiff and she sagged again at once. The mattress gave the merest rustle.

“So,” Ada said. “You’re awake.”

With effort, Buddy turned her head. Ada was seated beside the bed, her head bowed, that tangled carpet of hair veiling her face. In her hands was Lisa’s rifle and she held it like a lover.

Buddy did not speak. Ada, too, remained silent, for so long that for a moment Buddy suspected she had died sitting up. But then she began to talk, only her mouth moving, the rest of her pale and stiff as marble.

“After the world ended, we all knew the measures we would need to take in order to survive. The lessons we’d been taught before had become very quaint. Do not kill. Do not steal. Do not covet. All nothing but dust, now. We spilled blood without hesitation or regret. Because we had been left no other choice.” She paused. “And then. The first birth came, and the birth went wrong. As always, I was the one who had to do what was necessary. I thought that all of our futures might very well have been choking to death within that womb. But still. When I slit her throat to navel and pulled Lisa out from the corpse, I felt for the first time in many years that I had committed some transgression. That whatever God still watched over us had finally taken offense. The others must have felt the same. That, I suspect, is why none of them could stop talking about her. The memory of that act hangs over us all.

“You commit your sins. You do it in the name of survival. And you tell yourself that in the end all your crimes will bring about the realization of some greater cause and finally you will be given a time of rest. A moment to reflect and atone for the trail of corpses you’ve left behind. I did my best with Lisa. I thought that, even if she couldn’t help us reproduce, she could at least serve as an example of what a child must be in the new age. One raised by the community, acting for the community. But you see what became of it. She’d been born the wrong way ‘round and all her life she still never fit into the world we tried to make. Our time of rest never came.”

Ada’s hands shook as she gripped the rifle’s barrel.

“She told us what she did,” she whispered. “Limped all the way back here with one arm bitten down to a stump, and told us. And then she laughed. Laughed in all our faces.” Ada rested her head against the rifle, her voice broken and quavering. “You stupid old woman, what have you done.”

Buddy watched as she took several deep, shaky breaths. Ada still wouldn’t meet her eye. She seemed loathe to do it.

“Sweetheart,” Ada said, “I am so sorry.”

Buddy said, “Where is she.”

The rain murmured.

“She’s in the cell,” Ada answered, at last. “You know where that is, I assume. We worked her over pretty badly when she broke the news to us, but I think you want to finish the job. I can give you that much, at least.”

Buddy clenched her fists. Already the stiffness was draining from her body.

“And after that, we’ll keep trying,” Ada said. “We’ll find someone else. Another man, somewhere. You won’t even have to do anything this time, you’ve gone through enough already. But as long as we’re alive, we can’t give up. That’s the only reason there’s life at all.”

“You really think there’s still hope?”

“I do. I truly do.”

“Even after all this?”

“Yes.”

“Why did she follow me?”

“I- What?”

That made Ada turn her head. Her hair fell away to reveal that one cloudy eye gleaming wetly in the dark. Buddy hadn’t moved. She didn’t seem to blink.

“I told you I had to go out alone,” she said. “That no one could follow me. But Lisa did. Why did you let her go?”

“I didn’t, obviously,” Ada said. “She snuck out. That’s what the girl always did.”

“With only one exit.”

“We were all on edge, waiting for your return. Luz especially feels awful, it was her job to-”

“Lisa said you wanted to kill me.”

Ada’s eye widened. Just a fraction, just for an instant.

It was enough.

The silence in the room became much heavier. Redolent with foreboding, like a tunnel full of firedamp. A single spark could turn explosive.

Ada set the rifle aside and stood.

“If you believe her,” she said to Buddy, “even after all she’s done to you, then I don’t know what else to say.”

Buddy’s eye followed her as she tottered to the exit. She placed her hand flat on the door and then stopped.

“They weren’t certain what to do with you, when you returned,” she said. “I insisted that we take you back in.” A pause. “In the end, all we have is each other. Remember that.”

The door swung open, bathing the room in pale light, and then shut again.

After several minutes and a minor struggle, Buddy sat up, her fingers questing across her naked torso. Her chest had been wrapped tight in gauze; she guessed that Lisa’s bullet had missed her organs but it still hurt to breathe and that rotten heat inside her had barely ebbed. When she got to her feet her knees shook until she forced them to be still.

She took up Lisa’s rifle. When she pulled the trigger all that came was a dull click. It wasn’t loaded and even if she’d had bullets she didn’t understand the weapon’s operation well enough to load it herself.

As for her poncho, she hadn’t expected to find it but there it was, crumpled in a heap at the foot of the bed. Ada had apparently torn it off her and cast it aside so that Karen or whoever else could perform first aid. When she lifted it up the garment was heavy and tacky with blood, still not fully dry. She hadn’t been unconscious for long. Six hours, maybe less. And even with the added weight, she still felt the weight that the women had missed.

Buddy reached inside and withdrew the Joy.

Three pills, like iridescent insects in her palm. She remembered shoving these down her throat by the handful in earlier days, chewing them up and washing them down, just to silence the ache of wounds within and without. The pills ate the pain and then started to eat everything else.

Brad also took them in threes.

Her breath caught in her throat. She looked up, eye wide and staring.

She left the station still unclothed from the waist up, the barrel of Lisa’s rifle clutched in one hand. She dragged the weapon behind her and its stock scraped on the concrete. She’d tied the bag’s drawstring around her neck and it hung there like some medicinal warding. In times that neither she nor anyone else would ever know again people had once filled such bags with all manner of foul substances to ward off ghosts and here the fog did trail and cringe around her like hungry spirits, and her stare was fixed on something unseen, and she lurched across the station’s awning and past Edith’s creaking chair with the gunstock’s rasping slither in her wake.

Behind Buddy, the creaking stopped.

She turned and saw Edith sitting upright. Her shotgun was raised and the twin bores looked big enough to swallow the world. Her arms didn’t so much as twitch under the gun’s weight and her usual senile smile had inverted into something hard and set and without a speck of mercy.

Buddy didn’t move or speak. She was just outside the station’s shelter again and the rain crawled across her bare flesh in knotted serpentine patterns.

After a long moment, Edith smiled again and relaxed.

“It’s too late.”

At first Buddy didn’t even realize that rich and rusty voice came from the old woman’s throat. She put the shotgun back in her lap and returned to rocking and smiling, rocking and smiling.

Edith said, “It will only get later.”

Buddy left her behind.

The gunstock cut a deep trench in the mud as she staggered to the village entrance. It wasn’t long before she felt eyes on her but she didn’t hasten her step, not even with the alarm began to ring again, those totems of junk squawking and clattering in counterpoint to her every footstep. That stone fissure loomed before her with a throat full of fog and she walked until she was on the street and the fog parted to show her what lay there. What Ada had never even bothered to mention.

She stopped and looked at it.

_If I’d gotten the chance I would have killed him myself._

It was no surprise that Ada hadn’t spoken of him. He had always been difficult to remember. There had been some quality in him that rendered him less than a man. Whatever had happened to him before the Great White Flash had drained from him something essential, so that for all his muscle and intensity it was as though he was partly transparent, a poor fit for this world or any other. In the end, the two of them had also had that in common. Even Lisa hadn’t seen him coming until it was too late.

_In the end, all we have is each other._

The women had been very thorough when he’d turned up at their doorway. By his wounds Buddy supposed that, after they’d gotten her away from him, they’d beaten him within half an inch of his life and then burned him the rest of the way. Brad’s bloated and cetacean corpse was blackened down to his malformed bones in places. In others his flesh hung in loose tatters like wet paper and shone wetly in the mist. It was just off-center of the road and she realized the women had tried to drag his carcass away and over the edge, into the endless mist. It had just been too heavy for them to bear.

_Can’t be mended. Can’t be recovered. Can’t be put right again._

Buddy’s face was stony. There seemed to be a great wind howling within her head but through that gale she heard approaching footsteps behind her, bare feet splashing on the puddled asphalt. There were a great many of them.

_People are always going to use you…and hurt you…_

What had gone through the remnants of his mind, she wondered. How cognizant had he been of his actions. The Joy Mutants, consumed by their desires. In the end it seemed his desire had been to protect her after all. And it had consumed it all the same.

The footsteps were now very close.

_Live life for you…_

Someone laid a hand on Buddy’s shoulder.

*             *             *

_The Big Girl has cometh._

*             *             *

Lisa’s stump itched.

She was chained to the ground, stripped naked, her left arm a bandaged nub that still bled through its dressings. The rain sieved through cracks in the cell’s stone ceiling and struck her skin like needles but she didn’t shy away from their sting. She’d lain in the dark long enough for her eyes to adjust and traced the trails of water across the walls, the shining capillaries of wet.

After a time there was a commotion outside. She smiled at the noise. Then, eventually, the noise stopped.

Through the pitter-patter of rain outside the cave approached another sound. A guttural scrape, an off-tempo squish. Lisa turned her head and saw the silhouette in the gray light. Its limbs were all wrong.

It limped toward her using the rifle as a cane, its stock dully striking the ground with every step. One of its feet had been twisted almost ninety degrees out and in the murk gleamed the white of bone. The flesh was misshapen, in places. The pale flesh was tattooed all over with shadow that smelled of iron.

Lisa waited for it to speak but it only stood over her, shaking with every labored breath. The shadow dripped from it and pattered on the stone, as though it had brought its own rain into the cell. Lisa eyed it, then noticed the bottle in its hand.

“So you remembered,” she said, then looked back into its single livid eye. “You look like shit.”

No answer. It stood and struggled to breathe.

“That mutant of yours really was a pain in my ass,” she went on, casually. “I figured I could just shoot you and tell Ada the kid had died by accident, but that went tits-up once he chomped my arm. Serves me right for getting too close, I guess.” She sighed. “But it turned out alright in the end. Don’t you think?”

Now her own teeth gleamed. She bared them in a spitless grin.

“I never lied to you,” Lisa said. “She really had planned to take the kid for herself from the start. Just needed you to get rid of the mutants first. So don’t be too hard on yourself. You were screwed from the minute we met.” That grin rolled up to face Buddy. “I think it’s for the best. Don’t you? Between you and your parents, we’ve all had enough of the Yado family fucking everything up. We didn’t need another one.”

“Why?”

The word didn’t seem to emerge from Buddy’s throat. Less a voice than a tectonic scrape, some hateful mutter deep beneath the earth.

“Why what?” said Lisa.

“Before. You said that someday I would lose everything. Why.” Buddy’s blood dripped and ran. “Was it a warning? Was it a joke?”

Lisa shrugged as best she could with her chains, then turned back to the ceiling.

“It was what it was,” she said.

That did not appear to be a satisfactory answer. Blood spurted from Buddy’s knuckles as she tightened her grip on the gun.

“You didn’t listen, anyway. You’re not laughing.” Lisa smirked. “But that’ll change soon, I bet. Can’t even guess how many pills you must’ve had to swallow to kill them all. I wonder what you’ll look like when it’s over.” She gestured at the bottle. “That’s for me, right? Just leave it here.”

“Yes,” said Buddy. “It’s for you.”

Something in the harmonic of her voice made Lisa’s smile disappear. Buddy bent low, and carefully set the bottle down. Then, she grabbed at something on her neck.

“I didn’t take any,” she said. “It’s for you. It’s all for you.”

Lisa’s eyes widened and the chains kicked up a cheerful jangle as she fought her restraints but their music was feeble yet, she’d lost too much blood and too much strength crawling across the desert to deliver her gleeful hateful news to the assembled women, to see their shattered faces as the last scrap of hope left them, and now here was the Big Girl looming large, straddling her, her dark gift dangling by its drawstring in one hand, and Lisa clamped her jaw shut, she grit her teeth until they cracked within her gums, but Buddy brought the rifle’s butt down on her arm hard enough to smash the bone to splinters and she bucked and screamed and then felt the pills tumbling past her teeth and lodging under her tongue and pilings inside her throat as she upended the bag and she gagged on their venom-sweet taste but couldn’t spit them out, couldn’t, not when she was on her back like this, not with Buddy now pouring the scorching alcohol in her mouth and then gripping her jaw and working it up and down as though the chained girl was a macabre nutcracker, and the Joy and the drink mixed into a sick slurry and her throat worked as she swallowed it down gulp after gulp.

Lisa hacked up blue ooze turned black in the darkness of the cell. Her stomach revolted and her muscles seized and twitched. Still she worked against her restraints, even with the broken arm, even though the agony, hoping in some dim corner of her mind that maybe a splinter of bone would work loose from the ruin and cut her heart before the drugs did their work. But then she saw Buddy hunched before her as though in prayer, and felt the gun’s cold barrel tickle between her legs like the questing muzzle of some cold beast, and then she could only shake her head in a frantic denial that Buddy did not see and did not regard.

Buddy shoved the rifle forward and there was a great tearing of meat and gristle that was quickly drowned out by Lisa’s shriek, a keening that rang off the walls and fed itself until it seemed the only sound in the world. And then the sound was gone, and Lisa went limp.

Buddy turned and walked away.

She clutched at the cave walls for support, her useless foot trailing behind her. And as she reached its mouth she heard laughter in the dark. At first rueful and low, then strengthening, turning merry, higher and brighter like the sunrises Buddy had never seen and never would. She walked on and Lisa’s mirth snapped at her back until suddenly it was cut off in a monstrous creaking groan like a falling tree, and when the noise stopped she turned and saw that the cave was full of flesh, its soft mounds curling like pastry at the entrance. Somewhere inside that mass was the rifle, shining and splintered and cutting, cutting, cutting.

In this gray light on the women’s grey village the smears and splotches of red stood in harsh relief. Buddy had used the gun as a makeshift bludgeon and many of them lay facedown in the mud with their skulls concave. Edith was in a heap beside her rocking chair; she had neither moved nor ceased smiling as Buddy approached and swung the riflebutt at her temple. Several of the women had died in their homes – she had found Jo huddled and weeping in the sweltering steamroom behind her hut, and Karen hadn’t even looked up as Buddy had approached, instead sitting on her bed with unfamiliar photographs, whispering unfamiliar names. Luz lay in a heap beside the entrance with her limbs all akimbo like a badly assembled children’s toy; she’s gotten off a single shot that had pierced Buddy’s side but her gun was ill-maintained and had jammed after, and she’d still been frantically trying to clear it when Buddy had walked up to her aerie and torn out her throat with her bare hands and hurled her off the lookout and to the ground below. And here somewhere was Ada, now unrecognizable. Once Buddy had brought her down started beating her, it had taken her a while to stop.

It had been Becky the mushroom farmer who’d delivered the most severe blow – she’d seemingly materialized from the fog itself, gently smiling as always, and slashed Buddy’s throat with her long thin knife before Buddy had snapped her neck. That gash now pulsed red that stained Buddy all the way down to her broken foot, but it was far from the only wound she’d suffered. Lisa’s gunshot wound had bled through the bandages and the one inflicted by Luz marked her stomach like a livid red eye. Several fingers were missing from her right hand. The women had managed to throw several more firebombs and the skin on her black was blackened and flayed and in places her hair was burnt to the roots. She felt no pain. As before, when her child had died, she felt tethered to herself by the thinnest thread. A mere tug and she would float away.

Her legs gave way and she collapsed into the dirt. She swore and spit blood and started to crawl.

She left clods of mud in her trail as she pulled herself along, losing her grip here, losing her strength; at one point her neck went limp and she fell facedown in the muck and thought she would suffocate there before she could raise her head again, but she did, and kept going. When she reached the edge of the village the earth hardened and her nails ripped and bled as she fought for traction, the bloody streaks marking her progress. The rain quietly erased all of it as she went, pattering down the dirt, wiping away the blood.

At last she reached Brad’s corpse and the child was there, taking shelter from the rain. He watched with his owlish stare as she leaned against Brad and took him up in her arms. She pressed him against her chest, tried to share her heat.

A shadow fell over her and she looked up, squinting against the overcast sky. Her vision was swimming, dark streaks and whorls polluting it like ink in water, but there was no mistaking who stood above her. That bulk. That beard.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi.” She didn’t feel her throat making the word but there it was, floating through the air. “You were too late again. Why are you always so late?”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine. I took care of it.” She tried to smile, her vision dimming further. “I really messed up, didn’t I?”

“No worse than I did.”

“That bad, huh.”

He didn’t answer that. He always had trouble finding the right thing to say. Instead he looked down to the child at her breast.

“I assume that’s yours,” he said.

“Yes. He’s mine.”

“He looks tired.” He grew larger; his outline wavered and ran. “So do you. Maybe you should rest.”

She nodded and rocked the child in her arms. He was soundless and still.

“It’s all right,” she said. “You can sleep now. Sleep.”

She tried to see the child’s face but it had gone dark, a shadow printed on the skin, and when she looked back up Brad’s own shadow had grown so vast that it now covered the entire sky, those hidden eyes looking down on her dispassionately, and then those eyes were gone and a nucleus of deeper black erupted within his silhouette and grew and grew, night breaking open into darker night until only night remained.

In the end, the women’s last refuge had been a fragile one. The rainbarrels overflowed quickly and it didn’t take long for the endless water to erode the dirt beneath the barrels themselves, so that they toppled and spilled out their contents for good. The gutters painstakingly erected into the settlement’s walls rusted and rotted and eventually broke loose from their moorings; several smashed through the roofs of nearby huts as they fell. The huts themselves, without their residents’ constant, careful maintenance, were patiently pulled apart by water, roofs and walls buckling until the aluminum siding and tarpaper collapsed back into the garbage heaps they had originally been. The womens’ remains were buried by their ruined homes or sank into the mud until only the least mounds of their pale flesh was visible, like quartz deposits protruding from the earth. Only Edith, who had died beneath the station’s sturdy awning, remained whole, and her sloughing flesh pulled her smile ever wider as if the body found endless amusement in witnessing this deprecation.

The other witness was Buddy, whose ravaged body remained leaning against the mutated remains of Brad Armstrong. Her eye was wide and her mouth was set in a neutral line and her hands were empty and splayed at her sides like those of an unstrung marionette. In time the constant moisture scalloped her greying flesh with fungi and her eye tumbled back into her head to leave only the empty socket, and together with her grievous wounds this all made her resemble less a human and more a memorial, an errant gargoyle carved in the shape of a woman – beaten and ruined, but yet unbroken, and forever watching the end of the world.


	7. The Land

At the shores of the lake of blood, child and trumpet bathed in the sun.

Even the flies had been banished from Olathe but the relentless heat still had work to do. The lake, marbled with flesh and fat, baked and coagulated and developed a skim of bacterial froth that shimmered like an oil slick in the perpetual sundown. The stench of it would have been unbearable, had there been anyone left to smell it. Over time the child’s corpse browned like leather and drew taut across his bones, his splayed hands turned stiff and clenching as if in defiance, his wasted lips drawing back from those new pebbly teeth. His eyes shriveled and squinted so that with his cured hide he looked at once newborn and a thousand years old, a death premature and too long in coming. The trumpet fared better; its color warped and faded and its parts were strangled by the sand but there was no water to rust it, and as the days turned to weeks and then months it still resembled the instrument that had called this macabre landscape into being.

In the village beyond, the walls dry-rotted until they were little more than skins of dust and then collapsed as dust does; once they settled, there was no movement in the desert for a long time. The blood congealed, then foamed, then congealed again, until its top layer dried to flakes of desiccated iron that sifted like dunes of rust.

One day, the sun seemed to flare. Its shine a single pulse across the land. It appeared to lose definition, its bloody light spreading until it consumed the whole sky. Then, little by little, that light dimmed. From sweltering orange, to burgundy, to black.

Then, the first hard chips of stars.

In the west the horizon lightened again and the sun arrived, far smaller than it had been, as if it was sheepish at such a late arrival. It traveled on its axis and dragged the night and the moon behind it, and the shadows of child and trumpet bent and spun like compass-needles at their journey. Clouds arrived. They thickened. They turned black. From within their hearts flashed brilliant light as if they had delivered the shards of Olathe’s broken suns with them. Thunder boomed loud enough to make the collapsed village tremble.

When the downpour came it came all at once. The rain struck with hammerblow force and steam leapt up from the burning earth like a horde of ghosts. The lake boiled as the downpour diluted that cauldron of blood and forced it up and before long it broke the banks entirely and flooded across the land like a lanced boil, the tide seizing up the child and the trumpet and bearing them away with the broken houses of Olathe and all the bodies that lay there. The rain fell and the thunder roared and the lake’s waters already grew clearer, and everything was rotted and filled with promise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Thank you for reading.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxENr2OBvwg)


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